THE WHITE RAT AND THE MAZE PROBLEM 9 



NORMAL MAZE 



There is no need in this place of giving a long description of 

 the general behavior or giving the individual details of the 

 experimentation with the groups of rats in the normal maze. 

 The conduct differed in no respect from that noted by so many- 

 others. The curve of learning may be seen in Fig. 2. The 

 description of the mode of plotting this curve may be found in 

 my monograph on the tactile hair. 14 The actual time and the 

 number of errors for the first 10 trials are given in Table 1. 

 These records are made from the combined records of two 

 groups of animals, one of which had been previously trained 

 upon a black- white discrimination box. As this training proved 

 to have so little effect upon the subsequent maze record these 

 pages will not be burdened with the numerical results. 



TABLE 1 



Time and Error Records, First Ten Trials, on Normal and 



Black-white Mazes 



Time Errors 



Normal Black-white 

 Trial Maze Maze 



1 1804 sec. 1342 sec. 



413 

 254 

 211 



98 



72 



37 



48 



54 



39 



The training upon the box, on the whole, seemed slightly 

 disadvantageous to the group of animals which later learned 

 the original maze. There was not so high a degree of accuracy 

 as evidenced by the number of errors and the average time 

 taken per trial was longer than that of the other group which 

 had had no training. To account for this is not difficult when 

 we consider that the problems are distinctly different. In the 

 one case there is an immediate reaction, in time too brief to be 

 taken, to a situation which offers but two alternatives and in 

 which brightness is the determining factor. In the other case 



14 Vincent, S. B. The Function of the Vibrissae in the Behavior of the White 

 Rat. Behavior Mon., vol. 1, no. 5, p. 15. 1912. 



