THE WHITE RAT AND THE MAZE PROBLEM 5 



effect or it may serve merely for general orientation; (c) Vision 

 is not for perceptual purposes — ' The rat does not hang his 

 associations upon gross and obvious (visual) objects;" (d) Sight 

 may lessen random movements; (e) It may give general direc- 

 tion if not accurate distance; (f) Vision may even be a hin- 

 drance in such problems. 



In a previous paper 12 facts have been given which show that 

 the rat's vision is weak. It may be possible that a rat does 

 not discriminate stationary objects and it is probable that bright- 

 ness is the most effective factor. In this work, however, there 

 was no attempt made to substantiate such opinions or to eval- 



n 



■L 



FOOD BOX 



J 



Fig. 1. Plan of maze 



uate the visual sense. The only interest lay in the attempt 

 to see whether vision could not be introduced into the laby- 

 rinth problem as a control and if this could be done then to 

 determine what was its effect upon the establishment of the 

 automatism. 



APPARATUS AND MODE OF EXPERIMENTATION 



The maze used was the modified Hampton Court Maze which 

 Professor Watson describes in " Kinaesthetic and Organic Sen- 

 sations." 13 Indeed it was one of the same mazes which he used 

 in his experiments. The only change in the construction was 



"Vincent, S. B. The Mammalian Eye. Jour, of Animal Behavior, vol. 2, 



no. 4, pp. 249-255. 1912. 

 13 For detailed description see "Kinaesthetic and Organic Sensations," op. cit., 

 p. 16-18. 



