Animal intelligence: Experimental studies

by Edward L. Thorndike

This puts a new face upon the question of the origin and development of human abstractions and consequent general ideas. It has been commonly supposed that animals had ‘recepts’ or such semi-abstractions as Morgan’s ‘predominants,’ and that by associating with these, arbitrary and permanent signs, such as articulate sounds, one turned them into genuine ideas of qualities. Professor James has made the simple but brilliant criticism that all a recept really means is a tendency to react in a certain way. But I have tried to show that the fact that an animal reacts alike to a lot of things gives no reason to believe that it is conscious of their common quality and reacts to that consciousness, because the things it reacts to in the first place are not the hard-and-fast, well-defined ‘things’ of human life. What a ‘recept’ or ‘predominant’ really stands for is no thing which can be transformed into a notion of a quality by being labelled with a name. This easy solution of the problem of abstraction is impossible. A true idea of the problem itself is better than such a solution.

My statement of what has been the course of development along this line is derived from observations of animals’ behavior and Professor James’ theory of the nature of and presumable brain processes going with the abstractions and conceptions of human consciousness, but it is justified chiefly by its harmony with the view that conception, the faculty of having general notions, has been naturally selected by reason of its utility. The first thing is for an animal to learn to react alike only to things which resemble each other in the essential qualities. On an artificial, analytic basis, feelings of abstract qualities might grow out of reacting alike to objects similar in such a respect that the reaction would be useless or harmful. But in the actual struggle for existence, starting with the mammalian mind as we have found it, you will tend to get reactions to the beneficial similarities by selection from among these so-called mistakes, before you get any general faculty of noticing similarities. In order that this faculty of indifferent reaction to different things shall grow into the useful faculty of indifferent reaction to different things which have all some quality that makes the reaction a fit one, there must be a tremendous range of associations. For a lot of the similarities which are non-essential have to be stamped out, not by a power of feeling likeness, but by their failure to lead to pleasure. With such a wide range of associations we may get reactions on the one hand where impulses have been connected with one particular sense-impression because when connected with all others they had failed to give pleasure, and on the other hand, reactions where an impulse has been connected with numerous different impressions possessing one common quality, and disconnected with all impressions, otherwise like these, which fail to have that one quality.

Combined with this multiplication of associations, there is, I think, an equally important factor, the loosening of the elements of an association from one another and from it as a whole. Probably the idea of the look of the loop or lever or thumb latch never entered the mind of any one of my cats during the months that they were with me, except when the front end of the association containing it was excited by putting the cat into the box. In general, the unit of their consciousness, apart from impulses and emotions, is a whole association-series. Such soil cannot grow general ideas, for the ideas, so long as they never show themselves except for a particular practical business, will not be thought about or realized in their nature or connections. If enough associations are provided by a general curiosity, such as is seen among the monkeys, if the mental elements of the association are freed, isolated, felt by themselves, then a realization of the ideas, feelings of their similarity by transition from one to the other, feelings of qualities and of meanings, may gradually emerge. Language will be a factor in the isolation of the ideas and a help to their realization. But when any one says that language has been the cause of the change from brute to man, when one talks as if nothing but it were needed to turn animal consciousness into human, he is speaking as foolishly as one who should say that a proboscis added to a cow would make it an elephant.

This is all I have to say, in this connection, about association by similarity and conception, and with it is concluded our analysis of the nature of the association-process in animals. Before proceeding to treat of the delicacy, complexity, number and permanence of these associations, it seems worth while to attempt to describe graphically, not by analysis, the mental fact we have been studying, and also to connect our results with the previous theories of association.

One who has seen the phenomena so far described, who has watched the life of a cat or dog for a month or more under test conditions, gets, or fancies he gets, a fairly definite idea of what the intellectual life of a cat or dog feels like. It is most like what we feel when consciousness contains little thought about anything, when we feel the sense-impressions in their first intention, so to speak, when we feel our own body, and the impulses we give to it. Sometimes one gets this animal consciousness while in swimming, for example. One feels the water, the sky, the birds above, but with no thoughts about them or memories of how they looked at other times, or æsthetic judgments about their beauty; one feels no ideas about what movements he will make, but feels himself make them, feels his body throughout. Self-consciousness dies away. Social consciousness dies away. The meanings, and values, and connections of things die away. One feels sense-impressions, has impulses, feels the movements he makes; that is all.

This pictorial description may be supplemented by an account of some associations in human life which are learned in the same way as are animal associations; associations, therefore, where the process of formation is possibly homologous with that in animals. When a man learns to swim, to play tennis or billiards, or to juggle, the process is something like what happens when the cat learns to pull the string to get out of the box, provided, of course, we remove, in the man’s case, all the accompanying mentality which is not directly concerned in learning the feat.[16] Like the latter, the former contains desire, sense-impression, impulse, act and possible representations. Like it, the former is learned gradually. Moreover, the associations concerned cannot be formed by imitation. One does not know how to dive just by seeing another man dive. You cannot form them from being put through them, though, of course, this helps indirectly, in a way that it does not with animals. One makes use of no feelings of a common element, no perceptions of similarity. The tennis player does not feel, “This ball coming at this angle and with this speed is similar in angle, though not in speed, to that other ball of an hour ago, therefore I will hit it in a similar way.” He simply feels an impulse from the sense-impression. Finally, the elements of the associations are not isolated. No tennis player’s stream of thought is filled with free-floating representations of any of the tens of thousands of sense-impressions or movements he has seen and made on the tennis court. Yet there is consciousness enough at the time, keen consciousness of the sense-impressions, impulses, feelings of one’s bodily acts. So with the animals. There is consciousness enough, but of this kind.

Thus, the associations in human life, which compare with the simple connections learned by animals, are associations involving connections between novel, complex and often inconstant sense-impressions and impulses to acts similarly novel, complex and often inconstant. Man has the elements of most of his associations in isolated form, attended to separately, possessed as a permanent fund, recallable at will, and multifariously connected among themselves, but with these associations which we have mentioned, and with others like them, he deals as the animals deal with theirs. The process, in the man’s mind, leaving out extraneous mental stuff, may be homologous to the association-process in animals. Of course, by assiduous attention to the elements of these associations, a man may isolate them, may thus get these associations to the same plane as the rest. But they pass through the stage we have described, even then, and with most men, stay there. The abstraction, the naming, etc., generally come from observers of the game or action, and concern things as felt by them, not by the participant.

Criticism of Previous Theories

We may now look for a moment at what previous writers have said about the nature of association in animals. The complaint was made early in this book that all the statements had been exceedingly vague and of no value, except as retorts to the ‘reason’ school. In the course of the discussion I have tried to extricate from this vagueness definite statements about imitation, association of ideas, association by ideas. There is one more theory, more or less hidden in the vagueness,—the theory that association in animals is the same as association in man, that the animal mind differs from the human mind only by the absence of reason and what it implies. Presumably, silence about what association is, means that it is the association which human psychology discusses. When the silence is broken, we get such utterances of this theory as the following:—

“I think we may say then that the higher animals are able to proceed a long way in the formation and definition of highly complex constructs, analogous to but probably differing somewhat from those which we form ourselves. These constructs, moreover, through association with reconstructs, or representations, link themselves in trains so that a sensation, or group of sensations, may suggest a series of reconstructs, or a series of remembered phenomena.” (C. L. Morgan, Animal Life and Intelligence, p. 341.)