20 WALTER S. HUNTER 



assume that the first two were represented imaginally when the 

 last was presented.) 



The criticisms on Cole's entire work as outlined above reduce 

 to these: (i) The facts are either inconclusive or irrelevant. 

 And (2), there is no evidence of adequate controls. On the 

 positive side, the work suggests that the raccoon is more in- 

 telligent than the dog and cat, but it does not determine wherein 

 this superiority lies. 



14. Washburn's Cat on the Stairway 



There is one other type of behavior that deserves mention. 

 Again, it was not and need not be interpreted as necessarily 

 involving the presence of imagery. The illustration follows: 

 "A cat, indeed, once observed by the writer, did behave as a 

 human being would do to whom any idea had occurred, when, 

 on coming into the house for the first time after she had moved 

 her kittens from an upper story to the ground floor, she started 

 upstairs to the old nest, stopped halfway up, turned and ran 

 down to the new one. But errors of interpretation are possible 

 at every turn of such observations."^' 



This is an excellent illustration of the type of argument that 

 w^ould use "hesitation" and "wavering" as an evidence for 

 the presence of ideas. It is a mode of behavior that is found 

 almost everywhere in animal studies. A rat, e.g., hesitates at 

 a division point of the maze and finally selects the right path- 

 w^ay, or it runs half the length of a blind alley and then turns 

 back. Was it guided by an ideational representation of the 

 movements to be made and their consequences? Not neces- 

 sarily. Accidental stimuli may have initiated the new reaction 

 and any conflict present may have been resolved on a purely 

 sensory -motor level. The experimental technique for the con- 

 trol of such reactions will be discussed below (see p. 74). 



There is very little that needs to be said in the way of a sum- 

 mary of this historical review. All of the arguments for the 

 presence of imagery in animals that we have examined have 

 been found inconclusive. It is not that the various types of 

 behavior may not have involved a representative factor. The 

 point is that this possibility is nowhere proved necessary. The 

 fault does not lie in the exhaustiveness of the data. The vavi- 



3" Washburn, M. F. The Animal Mind. New York, 1909, p. 272. 



