THE INTERFERENCE OF AUDITORY HABITS IN 



THE WHITE RAT 



WALTER S. HUNTER 



ASSISTED BY 



JOS. U. YARBROUGH 



The University of Texas 



The present paper has grown out of the work which one of 

 the authors has already published on audition in the rat. 1 On 

 pages 324-5 of the last of these a report is made of some tests 

 on the retention of auditory habits. It was these tests that 

 gave us our cue. Negative results only had been secured by 

 attempting to train rats to turn in one direction through a box 

 when a tone or a chord was sounded and to turn in the opposite 

 direction when silence was given. This was a direct attack upon 

 the problem of tone sensitivity by the association method. It 

 occurred to us that working indirectly through habit interfer- 

 ence further data of value might be secured. By such a method 

 one could redetermine whether for the rat certain tones are 

 equivalent to silence. Should such a method succeed, its data 

 would be similar to that secured by the conditioned reflex method. 

 In the present paper we shall deal only with the tests bearing 

 upon habit interference. An immediately succeeding article will 

 stress the auditory sensitivity data secured by this method and 

 combine them with other observations from this laboratory. 



The same T-shaped discrimination box was used here that 

 has been described in the previous papers. The buzzer was 

 held on a wire over the apparatus in the same location indi- 

 cated for the tuning forks. The initial plan (which was much 

 supplemented as will be seen) called for 20 rats as follows: 



A. 20 rats train to turn rt. for handclaps, 1ft. for silence. 



B. 4 ra ts of set A train for 30 days to turn rt. for buzzer. 



1 Hunter, Walter S. The auditory sensitivity of the white rat. Journal Animal 

 Behavior, vol. 4, p. 215, 1914, and vol. 5, p. 312, 1915. 



