ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE. 



~ I 



the sort likely to be well attended to will be learned more 

 quickly. Here, too, accident may play a part, for a cat mav 

 merely happen to be attending to its paw when it claws. The 

 kinds of acts which insure attention are those where the move- 

 ment which works the mechanism is one which the cat .makes 

 definitely to get out. Thus A (O at front) is easier to learn than 

 C (button), because the cat does A in trying to claw down the 

 front of the box and so is attending to what it does, whereas it 

 does C generally in a vague scrabble along the front or while 

 trying to claw outside with the other paw, and so does not attend 

 to the little unimportant part of its act which turns the button 

 round. Above all, simplicity and dcjinitcncss in the act make 

 the association easy. G (thumb-latch), J (double) and K and 

 L (triples) are hard, because complex. E is easy, because 

 directly in the line of the instinctive impulse to try to pull one- 

 self out of the box by clawing at anything outside. It is thus 

 very closely attended to. The extreme of ease is reached when 

 a single experience stamps the association in so completely that 

 ever after the act is done at once. This is approached in I and 

 E. In these experiments the sense-impressions offered no dilh- 

 culty one more than the other. 



Vigor, abundance of movements, was observed to make dif- 

 ferences between individuals in the same association. It works 

 by shortening the first times, the times when the cat still does 

 the act largely by accident. Nos. 3 and 4 show this through- 

 out. Attention, often correlated with lack of vigor, makes a 

 cat form an association quicker after he gets started. No. 13 

 shows this somewhat. The absence of a fury of activity let 

 him be more conscious of what he did do. 



The curves on pages 22 and 23 showing the history of cats 

 I, 5, 13 and 3, which w^ere let out of the box Z when they licked 

 themselves, and of cats 6, 2, and 4, which were let out when they 

 scratched themselves, are interesting because they show asso- 

 ciations where there is no congruity (no more to a cat than to a 

 man) between the act and the result. One chick, too, was 

 thus freed whenever he pecked at his feathers to dress them. 

 He formed the association, and would whirl his head round ami 

 poke it into the feathers as soon as dropped in the box. Tliere 



