THE WHITE RAT AND THE MAZE PROBLEM 371 



These runs then, which are included in the total distance, are 

 not of the same nature as those other errors which take it en- 

 tirely off the trail. They indicate its method of learning. They 

 are interesting of course, and perhaps valuable for learning but 

 they are not of the same class as the others. In all of this 

 work, since our interest lay in the ability which the animals 

 possessed to follow or to neglect a certain sensory stimulus, the 

 errors consisted in leaving the true path. But it is not alone 

 the number and kind of errors which excite our interest in this 

 problem but also the distribution of the errors within the maze 



itself. 



DISTRIBUTION OF ERRORS 



The following tables show the distribution of errors in the 

 different mazes. Whether a cut de sac will be entered or not 

 depends upon the general direction in which it extends, its 

 relation to the food box and whether it is so placed that the 

 animal enters it headlong, etc., etc. For these reasons and for 

 the sake of fairness we have chosen to compare the total scores 

 of alleys 1, 2 and 3 with the corresponding error scores of 5, ^ 

 and 7, 3 in the Hampton Court Maze. The normal maze record 

 shows a greater score on every count for the first three than 

 for the last three alleys. The combined black-white maze table 

 reveals the same thing, as does also the cutaneous normal 

 records. In the cutaneous maze, alleys 4 and 5 were very near 

 to the food box, so near that in the open maze the animals 

 sometimes succeeded in jumping across. For this reason these 

 alleys were very attractive and the different results in the open 

 maze may, perhaps, be explained in this way. It will be ob- 

 served, however, that in the last three counts in the open maze 

 also, when the automatism is beginning to be perfected, favor 

 the final alleys. The olfactory maze, where the trail is in the 

 true path, gives a record where the conditions are reversed, but 

 when the trail is in the alleys the normal standard is again 

 approached although the degree of difference between the first 

 three and the last three alleys is less. The elimination of the 

 final members of the series first is not only true of the groups 

 as a whole but also of the individual animals. The records of 

 41 rats in the normal, black-white and cutaneous groups were 

 gone over and only five rats found where the relation was re- 



3 The cid de sacs are numbered in the order in which they occur in the maze. 



