Cole and Long, Visual Discrimination in Raccoons 665 



TABLE 3. 

 Raccoon No. 3. 



Day. 



RVTl 

 VBT2. 

 OYSl. 

 ROTl 

 VT2.. 

 Gray 5 



9% 



37% 



27%o" 



4% 



9% 



14% 



16% 

 13% 

 23% 

 19% 

 10% 

 19% 



It is evident from these tables that Raccoon ]S[o. 2 did select the 

 food color more often than any other color after the first three days, 

 and that No. 3 did the same on the third day and thereafter. Six- 

 teen and two-thirds per cent would have been chance selection, yet 

 an average of nearly twenty-four per cent persisted after the third 

 day's practice with ISTo. 2 and after the second day's practice with 

 No. 3. Since this per cent continued during 700 trials, the fact 

 must receive consideration, for this deviation from chance could not 

 be maintained during so many trials except by some constantly 

 operating cause. 



The investigator who uses this apparatus, however, must assume 

 that the animal's hunger will impel him to pass by every glass except 

 the one in which food has been found in the preceding trials. This 

 assumption certainly is not justified in the case of the raccoon, for 

 the animal has a strong instinctive tendency to explore every opening 

 it finds. An auger hole in the floor, the space beneath a chip, or an 

 uneven board, the experimenter's pockets, cufi^, or the bottom of his 

 trousers' leg were all provocative of this reaction. The naturalists 

 tell us that the raccoon secures his food by reaching into the holes of 

 crawfish, getting minnows or insects from the water-filled tracks of 

 cattle, and by catching the beetles and bugs which he finds under 

 chips and pieces of bark in the forest. However this may be, we 

 found that at first the raccoons could not pass by a single food con- 

 tainer without both reaching into it and looking into it. Instead, 

 the animal would go to one end of the row of vessels, explore the first 



*' This high per cent of right choices is doubtless accidental, as we had to dis- 

 continue work with this raccoon after twenty-two trials on this day. 



