A REPLY TO PROFESSOR COLE 



WALTER S. HUNTER 



I cannot permit Professor L. W. Cole's recent article in the 

 Mar. — Apr. number of this Journal, entitled "The Chicago ex- 

 periments with raccoons" to stand unprotested. Abstracting 

 from the deplorable tone of the publication, I should like to 

 draw attention to one or two points only. (1) Professor Cole 

 interprets my position as a desertion of the sensory-motor 

 hypothesis in favor of some vague imageless thought construct. 

 I tried strenuously in the monograph on Delayed Reactions to 

 make clear that the ideational function ascribed to raccoons and 

 to the child F was of a strictly sensory content. This content 

 in any case need not be visual. It is not necessary that mental 

 content copy the stimulus in order to represent it. In the 

 Delayed Reaction experiments the content could not be visual 

 because a visual sensation cannot be revived or reproduced. 

 The content of the representative factor was very probably 

 kinaesthetic (Delayed Reaction, p. 75) and was associated with 

 the light. These kinaesthetic sensations could be revived and 

 used as cues to differential responses. This is mentioned in 

 many places in the monograph and is summarized finally in the 

 classes of animal learning on page 79. I can see no grounds 

 for so odd a misinterpretation of my attitude. (2) Professor 

 Cole is aghast at the use of the term "steeple" for "staple" on 

 page 18 of my monograph. This error was probably due to a 

 slip in the proof reading. Had Professor Cole read a few lines 

 further down the same page, he would have found the perfectly 

 proper usage. (3) On page 167 of his article, by quoting a 

 portion only of a sentence which in its turn was in a vital con- 

 text, Professor Cole grossly misrepresents my statements con- 

 cerning odor controls. It is to be noted that a very different 

 criticism is involved to that offered elsewhere by Professor 

 Watson. (4) The only confirmation that my work offers of 

 Professor Cole's is, I still believe, the agreement indicated on 

 page 20 of my monograph. 



I see no need for further comments either upon the Delayed 

 Reaction or upon the work by Gregg and McPheeters. 



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