THE TEMPORAL MAZE AND KINAESTHETIC SENSORY 

 PROCESSES IN THE WHITE RAT 



WALTER S. HUNTER 



The University of Kansas 



In spite of the generally conceded fact that kinaesthetic pro- 

 cesses are of fundamental importance in animal behavior, almost 

 nothing is known that bears specifically upon these processes. 

 All motor responses involve them, and maze studies have par- 

 ticularly emphasized them. In addition scattered observations 

 abound in the literature describing position habits which have 

 interfered with work directed primarily toward the analysis of 

 other forms of sensitivity. In some cases these position habits 

 have been merely the tendency to go to a definite side of the dis- 

 crimination box at each trial. In other instances tendencies to 

 alternate from one side of the apparatus to the other have been 

 observed; and at least in one series of experimentation (dealing 

 with audition in the rat) this simple alternation has been com- 

 plicated by the addition of a sensory complex accompanying 

 success. In this case the rat would go to one side of the appa- 

 ratus trial after trial until escape was possible, whereupon it would 

 go to the other side until escape was possible there. This was 

 a case of simple alternation after success. It could not be termed 

 a purely kinaesthetic automatism because of its modification by 

 the factor of success. Success meant a free passage; failure 

 meant running into the end-stop of the apparatus (1). 



Except for Carr's recent extended study of simple alternation 

 (2) no attempt has been made to disentangle the kinaesthetic 

 processes incident to all studies of discrimination from the matrix 

 of other sensory processes in which they are obscured. The 

 present study, first reported in 1918 (3), .attempts to determine 

 how much a rat can do in terms of kinaesthesis using the follow- 

 ing problems: simple alternation; double alternation (twice to 



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P8YCHOBIOLOOY, VOL. II, NO. 1 



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