Animal Behaviour

by C. Lloyd Morgan

Professor Baldwin speaks of organic imitation and conscious imitation as “each a circular process tending to maintain certain stimulations and to avoid others.” Now, it may be granted that the tendency to maintain or repeat certain stimulations may be regarded as a “circular process.” But can the avoidance or non-repetition of others be so regarded? A large proportion alike of the hereditary adaptations and the acquired accommodations of behaviour are directed to this avoidance or non-repetition of hurtful stimulations. The instinctive shrinking of a chick from an aggressive animal is just as much adaptive as the repeated cuddling beneath the warm wing of the mother. The avoidance of nauseous cinnabar caterpillars is just as much an accommodation to the constitution of the environment as the reiterated seizing of palatable grubs. Even low down in the scale of animal life, Dr. Jennings’s observations on Paramecia seem to show that the retention of favourable stimulation is not due to its direct influence, but is the indirect result of a reaction to the relatively unfavourable stimulation which occurs when the Paramecium passes away from more satisfactory surroundings. A favourable environment is secured through the avoidance of the unfavourable. Unless, therefore, we exclude adaptive avoidance from the category of adaptations, we cannot regard all organic adaptation in a changing environment as a phenomenon of organic imitation due to a circular process tending to the reinstatement of stimulation.

Passing to the second question—Does all conscious imitation tend to reproduce the initiating stimulus?—we cannot unreservedly give an affirmative answer. It is true that when a child more or less successfully reproduces a sound which falls upon its ear, a like sound stimulus is afforded which may by a circular process incite to renewed effort, and lead to yet more successful reproduction. But when Professor Baldwin’s child, between nine and ten months old, imitated certain movements of the lips, there was no reproduction of the initiating visual stimulus. A chick seeing its companions run away or crouch will follow suit; and this would commonly be termed an imitative action; but there is here no reproduction of the initiating stimulus. Very much of the behaviour which is usually ascribed to imitation produces effects in consciousness quite different from that of the original stimulation. It is only by selecting one’s examples that one finds in them evidence in favour of Professor Baldwin’s “circular process.”

Since, therefore, this circular mode of activity is neither a characteristic of all conscious imitation, nor a distinguishing mark of all adaptive organic action, the grounds on which Professor Baldwin bases his extended usage of the term appear to be fallacious. And in this usage we cannot follow him.

Turning now to Professor Thorndike’s very different contention—that animals even so high as the cat and dog do not imitate in the sense of forming an association leading to an act from having seen another animal perform the act in a certain way—we may first describe some of his ingenious experiments designed to submit the matter to the test of observation under controlled conditions.[77]

Experiments were made with chicks in several ways. They were, for example, placed in pens, from which, in each case, “there was only one possible way of escape, to see if they would learn it more quickly when another chick did the thing several times before their eyes. The method was to give some chicks their first trial with an imitation possibility, and their second without, while others were given their first trial without and their second with. If the ratio of the average time of the first trial to the average time of the second is smaller in the first class than it is in the second class, we may find evidence of this sort of influence by imitation. Though imitation may not be able to make an animal do what he would otherwise not do, it may make him do quicker a thing he would have done sooner or later anyway. As a fact, the ratio is much longer. This is due to the fact that a chick, when in a pen with another chick, is not afflicted by the discomfort of loneliness, and so does not try to get out. So the other chick, who is continually being put in with him to teach him the way out, really prolongs his stay in. This factor destroys the value of these quantitative experiments, and I do not,” says Mr. Thorndike, “insist upon them as evidence against imitation, though they certainly offer none for it.”

Chicks, from sixteen to thirty days old, were also placed in boxes from which escape was open to them by such acts as pecking at the door, stepping on a platform, or pecking at a tack. The method of experiment was to put a chick in, leave him from sixty to eighty seconds, then put in another who knew the act, and on his performing it to let both escape. No cases were counted unless the imitator apparently saw the other do the thing. After about every ten such chances to learn the act, the imitator was left in alone for ten minutes. Out of thirteen cases tabulated only once was the act performed, in spite of the ample chance for imitation. “I have no hesitation,” adds Mr. Thorndike, “in declaring this one’s act in stepping on the platform the result of mere accident, and am sure that any one who had watched the experiments would agree.”

To test the influence, if any, of imitation in cats, the following method was adopted. A box was arranged with two compartments separated by a wire screen. “The larger of these had a front of wooden bars with a door which fell open when a string stretched across the top was bitten or clawed down. The smaller was closed by boards on three sides and by the wire screen on the fourth. Through the screen a cat within could see the one to be imitated pull the string, go out through the door thus opened, and eat the fish outside. When put in this compartment, the top being covered by a large box, a cat soon gave up efforts to claw through the screen, quieted down, and watched more or less the proceedings going on in the other compartment. Thus this apparatus could be used to test the power of imitation. A cat who had no experience with the means of escape from the large compartment was put in the closed one; another cat, who would do it readily, was allowed to go through the performance of pulling the string, going out, and eating the fish. Record was made of the number of times he did so, and of the number of times the imitator had his eyes clearly fixed on him.... After the imitatee had done the thing a number of times, the other was put in the big compartment alone, and the time it took him before pulling the string was noted and his general behaviour closely observed. If he failed in five or ten or fifteen minutes to do so, he was released and not fed. This entire experiment was repeated a number of times. From the times taken by the imitator to escape and from observation of the way that he did it, we can decide whether imitation played any part.... No one, I am sure, who had seen the behaviour of the cats would have claimed that their conduct was at all influenced by what they had seen. When they did hit the string the act looked just like the accidental success of the ordinary association experiment. But, besides these personal observations, we have in the impersonal time-records sufficient proofs of the absence of imitation.” Some observations on dogs are also described. From these it appears that the three individuals on which experiments were made failed to learn the way of getting out of a cage from seeing another dog escape. One of them was also allowed to see another dog beg for meat 110 times. But he never tried to imitate him and thus secure a piece of meat as a reward. It therefore “seems sure,” says Mr. Thorndike, “that we should give up imitation as an a priori explanation of any novel intelligent performance. To say that a dog who opens a gate, for instance, need not have reasoned it out if he had seen another dog do the same thing, is to offer instead of one false explanation another equally false. Imitation in any form is too doubtful a factor to be presupposed without evidence.”

Professor Thorndike is of opinion that monkeys are probably imitative in ways beyond the capacity of dogs and cats; but, at the time of writing, he had not substantiated his opinion, by analogous experiments. If so, it will perhaps prove that they are rational beings in the narrower sense defined in a previous chapter of this work. For it appears that the kind of imitation which Mr. Thorndike’s experiments go far to disprove, is what we may term reflective imitation. A cat with no experience of the means of escape, one that has tried to get out of the box by chance efforts in many directions and has failed, sees another cat perform an act acquired in this way, and learns nothing from the sight. This, no doubt, proves that the cat had not in any sense grasped the nature of the problem before it, had no notion of just where the difficulty lay, had not the wit to see that the performance of the other cat supplied the missing links in its own previous behaviour. It is questionable whether such missing links could be supplied in this way in the absence of some powers of reflection. The cat is unable to form an association, leading to an appropriate act, from having seen another animal perform the act in a certain way, partly because it cannot perceive the reason of its previous failure, and see that the other’s performance affords the requisite clue. The whole gist of the chance experience interpretation of animal behaviour is that there must be chance experience to build on. The cat cannot gain this by looking on never so intently, unless it be provided with a rational as well as a sensory eye. The act of pulling the string has been reached by the successful cat through the gradual elimination of many failures; it is a differentiated act, having no place in the previous experience of the kitten. It has never entered into the conscious situation, and cannot be supplied at will by a non-rational being.

As Mr. Thorndike himself says, “no cat can form an association leading to an act unless there is included in the association an impulse of its own which leads to the act.”[78] By “impulse,” Mr. Thorndike “means the consciousness accompanying a muscular innervation apart from that feeling of the act which comes from seeing one’s self move, from feeling one’s body in a different position, etc. It is the direct feeling of doing as distinguished from the idea of the act done gained through eye, etc.... The act in this respect of being felt as to be done or as doing is in animals the important thing, is the thing which gets associated, while the act as done, as viewed from outside, is a secondary affair.” I take it that by “impulse” is here meant what Dr. Stout would term the direct experience involved in conation.[79] If it have a place in experience distinguishable from that of stimulation and response it is included in what I have on a former page spoken of as the consciousness of behaviour as such, which was said to be essential. And I am surprised that Mr. Thorndike should have supposed that I believe that this could by any animal be “supplied at will.” In any case it seems probable, as the result of observation, that unless the consciousness of behaving in a specific manner has entered into the situation as developed in experience it cannot in animals enter into any subsequent representative complex. And it is the absence of such consciousness of behaving in a specific manner which the sight of the escaping cat fails to supply in Mr. Thorndike’s experiments.

Interesting and valuable as these experiments are, they are open to the criticism to which, as we have seen, his other experiments are also open—that the conditions are abnormal and cramped. Apart from reflective imitation, which they tend to disprove, they do not conduce to the kind of conscious situation which appears to be most favourable for the development of intelligent imitation founded on hereditary tendencies and propensities. It is through such imitation that, as Herr Groos says,[80] “animals learn perfectly those things for which they have imperfect hereditary dispositions.” The kind of situation which conduces to such intelligent imitation is that which involves the attitude of attention and interest rising, when these are sufficiently varied in their direction, into what is spoken of as curiosity. These, in their natural occurrence in animals, are parts of, or in any case accompaniments of the conative attitude—they are connected with activities and impulsive tendencies to behaviour. If attention and interest are directed to the behaviour of another animal, the conative attitude is that of imitation. Miss Romanes has described how skilfully a capuchin imitated the actions necessary to unlock a trunk. It does not seem necessary to assume that reflective imitation is here exemplified. The monkey need not regard the key and lock as the related parts of a puzzle to be practically solved, need not have any free idea of the difficulty it presents, need not in unlocking the trunk grasp the true nature of the difficulty or have any conception of its solution. Every several act of the capuchin, the seizing the key, the directing it here or there, and so on, is already supplied with the impulse of which Dr. Thorndike speaks. Attention, itself charged with impulse, directs and combines these pre-existing impulses to a new end. And since that which directs the attention is the act of another, we call the procedure imitative. But the varied and persistent effort differs in no essential respect from that of a two days’ chick, which pecks again and again at some speck which catches its eye, or that of a nestling jay, which will peck for long at some nail or piece of wire in its cage, twisting and turning its bill in many and varied ways. And success in opening the trunk is reached by the capuchin, not, it would seem, through any real appreciation of the essential kernel of the practical problem, but through the chance results of many varied efforts. Although in no other animals is it developed to so high a degree as in the monkeys, interest in the doings of others is an attitude by no means rare, and affords the basis of intelligent imitation. Perhaps the conditions in Dr. Thorndike’s experiments were not the best for the development of such interest in the procedure of another. And in any case the imitation of a particular mode of procedure, reached by the gradual defining of the impulse, could hardly be expected in the absence of the series of experiences by which that definition had been reached, unless the cat were capable of what has been above spoken of as reflective imitation.