Behavior; An Introduction to Comparative Psychology

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1914 edition. Excerpt: ...and tested whether the animal would have responded as readily to a white light as to the green. Instead, however, we began experiments upon two other rats, using stimuli both of which lay in the sensory range of the animal, viz., yellow, 595;U;u, and blue, 478/. In this case No. I responded positively to blue and No. II, positively to yellow. One interesting fact was brought out very clearly: when both stimuli were in the field the animal failed to form the habit within the time limits of the test. In order to hasten the growth of the habit only one stimulus (the positive in each case) was used. As might have been predicted from our tests on red and green, the habit arose readily. Then (with energy of both stimuli known) we introduced the negative stimulus. As fast as possible, without breaking down the habit, the intensity of the negative stimulus was increased. The following table shows the results of this test. Column 1 gives the number of days the test endured, and column 2 shows the angular opening of the sector. An opening of 10 admits a beam of very low intensity. At 360 the full intensity of the beam was utilized (i.e., the two stimuli possessed equal energy, but did not contain equal stimulating value). Column 3 gives the percentages of correct responses (in 10--20 trials). Tarle Showing Effect On Harit Of Leaving Positive Color At Full Intensity And Gradually Introducing Color Reacted Against Rat I (Reacting positively to blue) Angular Days 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 s J 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 opening on yellow 10 10 10 20 30 40 60 60 70 80 90 100 110 110 120 130 140 180 200 200 240 360 360 % correct 90 83 93 93 100 93 100 93 90 95 100 100 85 100 100 93 93 93 93 100 93 96 100 Rat II (Reactingpositively toyellow ) Angular...