Berry, Imitation in White Rats. 361 



other rat, he too will be able to get out. It is a case of what 

 Thorndike calls "transferred association" meaning by that, that 

 if one rat sees another get food by opening the door, the former 

 realizes that he would get food if he could open the door. It is 

 not through observation alone that the imitating rat learns which 

 movement to make to get out, but it is by observation of another 

 rat plus the experience of practicing the movement. That this is 

 true was shown quite conclusively in Experiment VI. In that 

 experiment the rats learned, from watching and practicing the 

 movements with No. 2, all of the movements necessary to get out, 

 with the exception of pulling down the knot with the forepaws 

 before trying to grasp it with their teeth. This movement was 

 apparently unnatural to most of the rats, hence their failure. 

 They readily learned from No. 2 that pulling the knot would open 

 the door, but they did not learn from him just how they should use 

 their forepaws in order to get hold of the knot. Under ordinary 

 conditions their random movements would have been sufficient 

 to enable them to open the door, but inasmuch as they were not, 

 they did not have sufficient discriminating power to enable them 

 to learn the right movement from No. 2. Small^ has shown that 

 the vision of white rats is defective. This would account in part 

 for their failure to make the required discrimination. 



Then to sum up, I think that my experiments have shown that 

 voluntary imitation of a certain type does exist in white rats. 

 While this imitation is not of as high a degree as that discovered 

 by KiNNAMAN in his experiments with monkeys, it is not different 

 in kind. 



^Small. Mental Processes of the Rat. American Journal of Psychology, Yo]. 12, p. 233. 1901. 



