THE DELAYED REACTION IN CATS 107 



TABLE Will— Continued 



When animal started : Correct Wrong 



Good orientation of head only 2 



Good orientation of body only 1 



Good orientation of body and head 259 3 



Poor orientation of body and head 9 26 



TABLE IX 



Good Bad 



Good orientation lost between release and starting 107 1 



Good orientation not lost between release and starting .40 



Poor orientation at release and at starting 4 12 



This table indicates plainly the similarity of the behavior of 

 my cats and Hunter's rats and dogs. The cats almost never 

 reacted in opposition to their orientation. (Here I mean, of 

 course, the orientation of both head and body, for many times 

 they reacted correctly in accordance with only the head or the 

 body.) Of 141 errors made by one of Hunter's dogs, 116 were 

 preceeded by faulty orientation. So, also, the cats' errors, as 

 the table shows, were in almost every case preceded by faulty 

 orientation. The non-orientation reactions are few enough to 

 be accounted for by chance. 



B. Position in the box. — Owing to the fact that during the 

 period of long delays only two boxes were used and they were 

 located far apart, the cats could have shifted their behavior 

 from the use of orientation cues to the use of position cues. In- 

 formation on this point was hard to get: (1) Because of the 

 continuous movements of the animals, and (2) because the size 

 of the release box in comparison with the distance to the exit 

 box is so small that but little is gained by being at one side 

 or the other. However, from the few observations made, the 

 writer is of the opinion that the position of the animal in the 

 release box does aid its reaction. 



4. Reaction Tendencies 

 In order to get representative data on errors and position 

 habits and the frequency with which these stereotyped forms of 

 response interfered with the work, I shall present 610 of Jim's 

 and 630 of Bess' reactions. It will be remembered that Jim 

 was tested on light and Bess on sound. The first 320 of Jim's 

 610 reactions were made on the three box experiments, while 

 the remaining 290 were made with only two. Position habits 

 in which one particular box was always chosen first, occurred 



