The Nature of Unsuccessful Acts and Their Order of Elimination in Animal Learning.

Abstract

The so-called unsuccessful movements in animal or human learning may be of two general types; they may be either illadaptive acts or merely excessive acts.By an ill-adaptive act is meant one that will either result in physical punishment or tend to check or disrupt the activity or the progress of the animal toward a eonsummatory reaction, such as food, or relief from confinement.By an excessive act is meant one that will neither do an injury to the organism nor will prevent it from reaching its goal, but that will, nevertheless, delay or prolong the process of eonsummatory reaction.Ill-adaptive acts as well as excessive acts may be of various degrees.Our assumption is (1) that under normal conditions animals will eliminate ill-adaptive movements sooner than they will excessive movements, (2) that the order of elimination of illadaptive movements will be according to the degree of ill-adaptiveness, and (3) that the merely excessive movements may sometimes not be eliminated at all. NATURE OF THE EXPERIMENTTo test out the above assumption an experiment was performed with 13 black and white rats.A "multiple choice" apparatus was used containing four compartments.One of these led the animal to the food box by a short path; another, by a longer path; another confined the animal for a period of time, and a fourth provided an electric shock punishment.For convenience of discussion we shall hereafter call these four compartments 1 Invaluable suggestions and assistance were received from Dr.