30 G. V. HAMILTON 



This penalty for failure to continue would cause the animal to 

 run out of the alley into the semicircular enclosure, following 

 which he would be as apt to reenter the alley from which he was 

 thus driven as any of the untried alleys. It might be expected 

 that the disadvantage growing out of lack of success in attempt- 

 ing to escape through a particular alley and electrical stimula- 

 tion for " loafing " in it would quickly lead to avoidance of 

 that alley. On the contrary, my records contain many instances 

 of persistent reentrance of an alley during a given trial when 

 as many as 10 successive punishments therein failed to direct 

 the subject's activities toward the untried alleys. I had feared 

 that the introduction of disadvantageous stimulation (electric 

 shock) would lead to avoidances of particular alleys, but this 

 expectation was set at naught by actual experiment. This fact 

 suggests that disadvantage that is not of a kind which is avoided 

 by reason of inherent, specifically appropriate features of reactive 

 equipment is a considerably less important determinant of reac- 

 tion than the traditional assumptions of comparative psychology 

 would lead us to suspect. I am not prepared, however, fully 

 to subscribe to Watson's (6) view that advantage and disadvan- 

 tage as such have nothing to do with habit formation. This 

 point will be discussed in another part of these studies. 



The automatic repetitions of unproductive activities and of 

 inappropriate inhibitions that one observes in the schizophrenic 

 psychoses are ascribed to purely psychical determinants by the 

 psychoanalysts, but there is much of value both to psycho- 

 pathology and to comparative psychology in the fact that such 

 behavior is apt to assert itself in the mammalian under conditions 

 that are unfavorable to the manifestation of more adequate reac- 

 tive tendencies and under certain natural conditions which are 

 characteristically encountered by infra-primate species. The ob- 

 servations that are recorded in these studies, supplemented by 

 various field and clinical observations, lead me to believe that 

 any of the following conditions are apt to precipitate reaction 

 of the D type and E type described in preceding pages : 



1. Inherent primitiveness of reactive equipment, such as is pos- 

 sessed by rodents and the young of more highly developed species. — 

 In my earlier studies (1) a twenty-six-months old infant gave 

 13 E-reactions and 10 D-reactions, whilst none of 10 human 

 subjects, whose ages ranged from eight years to maturity gave 



