Animal intelligence: Experimental studies

by Edward L. Thorndike

The release of a suggestion from inhibitions may as well be the release from ideas connected as antecedents with not performing the act as the release from ideas of not performing it. It is a question of fact whether, to get an act done by the subject, one must arouse in him an idea to which or to a part of which or to something like which the act has been bound by use or effect, or may arouse simply an idea of the act.

Finally, if an idea has a tendency to connect with a certain response, over and above the bonds due to exercise and effect, it should always manifest that tendency. If the connection is not made, it must be due to the action of some contrary force. It is less my duty to show that the laws of habit can account for hypnotic suggestibility, obsessions, and the like, than it is my opponents’ duty to explain why a man can spend a half day in hospitably welcoming a hundred ideas of acts and yet perform no one of them, save those in the case of which he has learned to do the thing when he thinks of doing it. Again, how can the mere addition of the idea of a future date to the idea of an act so utterly deprive it of present potency.

In view of all these facts it seems probable that ideas of responses act in connection just as do any other situations, and that the phenomena of suggestion and ideo-motor action really mean that any idea will, except for competing ideas, produce the response, not that is like it, but that has gone with it, or with some idea like it.

Rational connections are, in their causation, like any others, the difference being in what is connected.

It remains to ask whether situation and response are bound together in the case of reasoning by any other forces than the forces of repetition, energy and satisfaction? Do the laws of inferential thinking transcend the laws of exercise and effect? Or does the mind, even in these novel and constructive responses, do only what it is forced to do by original nature or has done without discomfort?

To defend the second alternative involves the reduction of the processes of abstraction, association by similarity and selective thinking to mere secondary consequences of the laws of exercise and effect. This I shall try to do.

The gist of the fact of abstraction is that response may be made to some elements or aspects of a situation which have never been experienced in isolation, and may be made to the element in question regardless of the gross total situation in which it inheres. A baby thus learns to respond to its mother’s face regardless of what total visual field it is a part of. A child thus learns to respond by picking out any red object, regardless of whether the redness be in an apple, a block, a pencil, a ribbon or a ball. A student thus learns to respond to any plane surface inclosed by three straight lines regardless of its size, shape, color or other than geometrical meaning.

What happens in such cases is that the response, by being connected with many situations alike in the presence of the element in question and different in other respects, is bound firmly to that element and loosely to each of its concomitants. Conversely any element is bound firmly to any one response that is made to all situations containing it and very, very loosely to each of those responses that are made to only a few of the situations containing it. The element of triangularity, for example, is bound firmly to the response of saying or thinking ‘triangle’ but only very loosely to the response of saying or thinking white, red, blue, large, small, iron, steel, wood, paper and the like. A situation thus acquires bonds not only with some response to it as a gross total, but also with responses to each of its elements that has appeared in any other gross totals.

Appropriate response to an element regardless of its concomitants is a necessary consequence of the laws of exercise and effect if an animal learns to make that response to the gross total situations that contain the element and not to make it to those that do not. Such prepotent determination of the response by one or another element of the situation is no transcendental mystery, but, given the circumstances, a general rule of all learning. The dog who responds appropriately to ‘beg’ no matter when, where, or by whom spoken, manifests the same laws of behavior. There is no difficulty in understanding how each element of a situation may come to tend to produce a response peculiar to it as well as to play its part in determining the response to the situation as a total. There may be some difficulty in understanding how each element of a situation comes to be felt whereas before only the gross total was felt. The change in consciousness from the ‘big, blooming, buzzing confusion’ to an aggregate of well-defined percepts and images, which accompanies the change in behavior from response to totals to response to parts or elements, may be mysterious. With the change in consciousness, however, we are not now concerned. The behavior of man and other animals toward the abstract elements of color, size, number, form, time or value is explained by the laws of instinct, exercise and effect.

When the perception or thought of a fact arouses the thought of some other fact identical in part with the former fact, we have so-called association by similarity. An element of the neurone-action is prepotent in determining the succeeding neurone-action. The particular way in which it determines it is by itself continuing and making connection with other associates. These it possesses by virtue of the law of exercise and effect.