THE ASSOCIATIVE PROCESSES IN ANIMALS. 



73 



mon element of the former is resultant satisfaction, and of the 

 latter the opposite. Later on it will be worth our while to 

 examine more carefully the way in which pleasurable and pain- 

 ful consequences respectively stamp in and stamp out the 

 impulses which lead to them. For the present we had better 

 return to actual specimens of animal behavior. 



In the first place, the selection may be of one impulse and 

 act from only one. If the chick had happened to go to E the 

 first thing he did, the resulting satisfaction might have so 

 stamped in that impulse that on the second, third, and later 

 trials he would never have done otherwise. If accident or 

 instinct furnishes the right impulse, it will naturally be con- 

 firmed just as readily as if picked out by its success from any 

 number of inappropriate ones. 



It will be well now to examine a more ambitious performance 

 than the mere discovery of the proper path by a chick. If we 

 take a box twenty by fifteen by twelve inches, replace its cover 

 and front side by bars an inch apart, and make in this front 

 side a door arranged so as to fall open when a wooden button 

 inside is turned from a vertical to a horizontal position, we shall 

 have means to observe such. A kitten, three to six months old, 

 if put in this box when hungry, a bit of fish being left outside, 

 reacts as follows ^ : It tries to squeeze through between the bars, 

 claws at the bars and at loose things in and out of the box, 

 reaches its paws out between the bars, and bites at its confin- 

 ing walls. Some one of all these promiscuous clawings, squeez- 

 ings, and bitings turns round the wooden button, and the kitten 

 gains freedom and food. By repeating the experience again 

 and again, the animal gradually comes to omit all the useless 

 clawings, etc., and to manifest only the particular impulse {e.g., 

 to claw hard at the top of the button with the paw, or to push 

 ao-ainst one side of it with the nose) which has resulted success- 

 fully. It turns the button round without delay whenever put 

 in the box. It has formed an association between the situation, 

 "confinement in a box of a certain appearance," and the impulse 

 to the act of clawing at a certain part of that box in a certain 



1 Confinement alone, apart from hunger, causes sjmilar reactions, though not 

 so pronounced. 



