THE WHITE RAT AND THE MAZE PROBLEM 



IV. THE NUMBER AND DISTRIBUTION OF 

 ERRORS— A COMPARATIVE STUDY 



STELLA B. VINCENT 



Chicago Normal College 



What is the maze problem ? It is the learning of a difficult 

 path, having many blind alleys, under a stimulus so strong 

 and certain that finally, when put into the labyrinth, the animal 

 runs swiftly and surely to the goal without error. It consists 

 of a series of movements which tend toward a definite end and 

 which are so ordered that the position and the direction of the 

 turns seem to be the all important factors. The animal's task 

 is to learn this motor co-ordination, ours, if possible, to find 

 out how it does it. 



In the learning of the maze we find not a single problem 

 but a complex of many and much light has been thrown upon 

 them through the work of Small, Watson, Richardson, Carr 

 and others. Some of the questions which arise in the course 

 of such investigations are, however, still without satisfactory 

 answers. The preceding numbers of this series have dealt with 

 the problems of sensory control in the maze. This paper at- 

 tempts to deal, briefly, with some of the more general features 

 of the maze problem in the light of that experimentation. One 

 question which immediately suggested itself concerned the rela- 

 tive value of the different senses when directive in such a problem. 



THE RELATIVE EFFECTIVENESS OF THE DIFFERENT SENSES 



AS MODES OF CONTROL 



This comparison is not an easy one to make since any one 

 sense factor is never isolated but only emphasized in the sensory 

 complex. The following table (I) shows factual data taken 

 in different ways from the learning scores. If we turn this into 

 terms of per cent, making the lowest and therefore best score 

 always 100, and basing the others on this we get table II. By 

 normal maze is meant the unpainted wooden maze where the 



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