182 



J. F. DASHIELL 



Many kinds of mazes must be used, and attempts be made to 

 make the earlier and the later blind alleys as similar as possible 

 in local design. But maze analysis would have perhaps even 

 greater importance in the precise study of the formation of 

 multiple habits and their interrelations. At present it is possible 

 that maze problems are accepted as equal in difficulty that 

 are really not equal, and vice versa; again, particular open runways 

 and particular blind alleys are by no means definitely evaluated. 

 As a sample of how this kind of work can be approached the 

 writer reports a brief study made in the Oberlin College labo- 



B 



A 



t 



FIG. 1 



ratory. His class hi animal psychology were reading Watson's 

 "Behavior" for one of their texts, and upon coming to a certain 

 exposition therein that excited their doubt they decided to "try 

 it out" experimentally. In building up his argument for fre- 

 quency as the most potent factor in the selection and fixing of 

 successful variations from the whole repertoire of an animal's 

 reactions, the author makes use of the following exposition: 



Let A and B (fig. 1) represent the segments of the true pathway and 

 X the entrance to any cul-de-sac (let the segments be chosen somewhere 

 in the middle of the maze). We will suppose that the animal is on its 

 way to the position A for the first time. The chances of entering B 



