HABIT FORMATION IN THE DOCx 19 



animals may have been reacting to pain and not to tone ; an 

 e-640 d.v. trumpet-tone, sounded at close quarters in a small 

 room, is certainly both loud and high enough to occasion pain 

 in the human subject. And finally, it is a commonplace that 

 Swift's ascription to the dog of "intellectual" processes and a 

 highly developed "abilit}^ to think," is unscientific. There is 

 no possible means by which we may experience an approxima- 

 tion to the dog's "content," in the first place; and besides, we 

 can interpret his behavior adequately and far more surely with- 

 out reh'ing upon a construct. Indeed, we can explain his reac- 

 tions quite satisfactorily on the assumption that he has no 

 mental content ; and the assumption can no more be disproved 

 than can the one of Swift's. 



As appears in the foregoing discussion of work done by other 

 investigators, the problem of localization of the auditory center 

 has been left by them in an unsatisf actor}' state. Rothmann 

 and Alunk place the auditory center in the temporal region ; 

 Munk asserts that different portions of the region perform highly 

 differentiated functions. Kalischer in.sists that the center for 

 pitch is infracortical ; that tone-discrimination is made in the 

 "peripheral end-organs of the nervus acitsticns;'' and that the 

 center for noise is another center than that for pitch. Swift 

 tells us that the center must be cortical, but that he has demon- 

 strated that it cannot lie in the region pointed out by Munk 

 and Rothman. As has been pointed out, the methods of con- 

 ducting behaA'ior tests employed by all these experimenters are 

 decidedly crude and their widely divergent conclusions may be 

 explained at least partially by reference to the methods of 

 controlling the animals' behavior. 



PRELIMINARY EXPERIMENTATION 



In April, 1 910, at the suggestion of Professor Watson, I 

 began as an experiment in comparative psychology a series of 

 tests on the audition of dogs, in the hope of accomplishing the 

 following purposes : 



1. To see whether the behavior results of Kalischer and 

 others could be confirmed by tests made under more reliable 

 conditions of control. 



2. To devise a satisfactor}^ method of testing the limits of 

 pitch-discrimination in the higher vertebrates. 



