ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE. cyj 



All these data show that traces of tiie co:.;.. ^i. .... .u,v,c 



formed are very slow in being lost. If we allow that part of 

 the time in the first trial in all these cases is due to the time 

 taken to realize the situation (time not needed in the trials when 

 the association is forming and the animal is constantly being 

 dropped into boxes) we may say that the association is as firm 

 as ever for a considerable time after practice at it is stopped. 

 How long a time would be required to annul the influence of 

 any given quantity of experience, say of an association which 

 had been gone through with ten times, I cannot say. It could, 

 if profitable, easily be determined in any case. The only case 

 of total loss of the association (No. i in C) is so exceptional 

 that I fancy something other than lapse of time was its cause. 

 The main interest of these data, considered as quantitative esti- 

 mates, is not psychological, but biological. They show what a 

 tremendous advantage the well-developed association-process is 

 to an animal. The ways to different feeding grounds, the 

 actions of enemies, the appearance of noxious foods, are all 

 connected permanently with the proper reaction by .a few ex- 

 periences which need be reinforced only very rarely. Of course, 

 associations without any permanence would be useless, but 

 the usefulness increases immensely with such a degree of per- 

 manence as these results witness. An interesting experiment 

 from the biological point of view would be to see how infre- 

 quently an experience could occur and yet lead eventually to a 

 perfect association. An experiment approximating this is re- 

 corded in the time-curves for Box II in Fig. 4, on page 20. 

 Three trials at a time were given, the trials being two or three 

 days apart. As may be seen from the curves, the association 



was readily formed. 



The chief psychological interest of these data is that they 

 show that permanence of associations is not memory. The fact 

 that a cat, when after an internal she is put into box G, pro- 

 ceeds to immediately press the thumb-piece and push the door, 

 does not at all mean that the cat feels the box to be the same 

 from which she weeks ago freed herself by pushing down that 

 thumb-piece, or thinks about ever having felt or done anything 

 in that box. She does not refer the present situation to a situation 



