THE CHICAGO EXPERIMENTS WITH RACCOONS 



L. W. COLE 



University of Colorado 



At the University of Chicago, three of Professor Carr's gradu- 

 ate students, Dr. W. S. Hunter, 1 and Messrs. F. M. Gregg and 

 C. A. McPheeters 2 have been engaged in repeating experiments 

 similar to mine on raccoons, with results which are most grati- 

 fying to me. 



Hunter (p. 46 and beyond) found the behavior of the raccoons 

 as different from that of his dogs and rats as I found it different 

 from the behavior of cats. He was compelled, as a result of 

 his experiments, to give up the mere sensori-motor explanation 

 of the behavior of these animals, nor could he attribute it to the 

 association of motor impulses with a whole situation. Motor 

 attitudes could, he thought, account for the behavior of the rats 

 and dogs. It would not serve for an explanation of the reactions 

 of the raccoons. At the close of my experiments, I, too, was 

 compelled to regard those explanations as inadequate. He 

 found that children and raccoons could respond successfully 

 to a stimulus after a much longer delay than could the rats and 

 dogs. He found for the raccoons a maximum delay of twenty- 

 five seconds. The longest delay that I used was at least six 

 seconds, or possibly nine seconds, if we consider only positive 

 reactions of the animals. He compares the behavior of the 

 raccoon favorably with that of a two-and-a-half -year-old child. 

 Moreover, he admits an idea as a "possible cue" used by the 

 raccoons and the children, as against purely motor or sensory 

 cues, used by the other animals tested, though he prefers to 

 attribute the reactions of the raccoons and those of, at least, 

 the youngest child to "imageless thought." 



Now that my experiments have been confirmed so fully I must 



1 Hunter, Walter. S The delayed reaction in animals and children. Behavior 

 Monographs, vol. 1, no. 1, 1913. 



2 Gregg, F. M. and McPheeters, C. A. Behavior of raccoons to a temporal 

 series of stimuli. Jour. Animal Behavior, 1913, 3, 241-259. 



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