Laws and Hypotheses for Behavior 249 



The electric shock administered just as an animal starts on 

 the wrong path or touches the wrong mechanism, is potent, 

 but the same punishment administered ten or twenty 

 seconds after an act will have little or no effect upon that 

 act. 



Close temporal sequence is not the only means of insuring 

 the connection of the satisfaction with the response producing 

 it. What is called attention to the response counts also. 

 If a cat pushes a button around with its nose, while its main 

 occupation, the act to which its general 'set' impels it, to 

 which, we say, it is chiefly attentive, is that of clawing at 

 an opening, it will be less aided in the formation of the habit 

 than if it had been chiefly concerned in what its nose was 

 doing. The successful response is as a rule only a part of all 

 that the animal is doing at the time. In proportion as it 

 is an eminent, emphatic part of it, learning is aided. Sim- 

 ilarly discomfort eliminates most the eminent, emphatic 

 features of the total response which it accompanies or 

 shortly follows. 



The third factor, the susceptibility of the response and 

 situation to connection, is harder to illustrate. But, ap- 

 parently, of those responses which are equally strongly con- 

 nected with a situation by nature and equally attended to, 

 some are more susceptible than others to a more intimate 

 connection. 



The things which have to be equal in the case of the law 

 of exercise are the force of satisfyingness; that is, the 

 action of the law of effect, and again the readiness of 

 the response to be connected with the situation. 



The operation of the laws of instinct, exercise and effect 

 is conditioned further by (i) what may be called the law 

 of assimilation or analogy, - - that a situation, especially 

 one to which no particular response is connected by original 



