formation or the execution of a particular habit.
As a means of measuring the intelligence of an animal,
of determining the facility with which it is capable
of adjusting itself to new environmental conditions,
and of measuring the permanency of modifications which
are wrought in its behavior by experimental conditions,
I value the labyrinth method much less highly now
than I did previous to my study of the dancer.
It is necessarily too complex for the convenient and
reasonably certain interpretation of results.
Precisely what is meant by this statement will be
evident in the light of the results of the application
of the discrimination method to the dancer, which
are to be presented in the next chapter. The
labyrinth method is an admirable means of getting certain
kinds of qualitative results; it is almost ideal as
a revealer of the role of the senses, and it may be
used to advantage in certain instances for the quantitative
study of habit formation and memory. Nevertheless,
I think it may safely be said that the problem method
and the discrimination method are likely to do more
to advance our knowledge of animal behavior than the
labyrinth method.
CHAPTER XIV
HABIT FORMATION: THE DISCRIMINATION METHOD
Discrimination is demanded of an animal in almost
all forms of the problem and labyrinth methods, as
well as in what I have chosen to call the discrimination
method. In the latter, however, discrimination
as the basis of a correct choice of an electric-box
is so obviously important that it has seemed appropriate
to distinguish this particular method of measuring
the intelligence of the dancer from the others which
have been used, by naming it the discrimination method.
It has been shown that neither the problem nor the
labyrinth method proves wholly satisfactory as a means
of measuring the rapidity of learning, or the duration
of the effects of training, in the case of the dancer.
The former type of test serves to reveal to the experimenter
the general nature of the animal’s capacity
for profiting by experience; the latter serves equally
well to indicate the parts which various receptors
(some of which are sense organs) play in the formation
and execution of habits. But neither of them
is sufficiently simple, easy of control, uniform as
to conditions which constitute bases for activity,
and productive of interpretable quantitative results
to render it satisfactory. The problem method
is distinctly a qualitative method, and, in the case
of the dancing mouse, my experiments have proved that
the labyrinth method also yields results which are
more valuable qualitatively than quantitatively.
I had anticipated that various forms of the labyrinth
method would enable me to measure the modifiability
of behavior in the dancer with great accuracy, but,
as will now be made apparent, the discrimination method
proved to be a far more accurate method for this purpose.
Copyrights
The Dancing Mouse from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
