282 The Animal Mind 



an electric bell rung whenever the birds entered a wrong 

 alley, and a wooden bell sounded when they emerged and 

 took the right course. After they had learned the path 

 under these conditions the two kinds of sound stimuli 

 were interchanged, and the result was a certain amount 

 of confusion on the part of the birds. On the whole, in 

 the case of active animals whose vision is not highly de- 

 veloped, such as the rat, the principal factor in learning a 

 maze appears to be the actual running of it. As the paths 

 are traversed at random, the useless movements tend to 

 be dropped off, and the successful ones not merely to sur- 

 vive, but to become organized into a system such that each 

 movement itself provides the stimulus for the succeeding 

 one. Vincent (747) found that while visual cues aided 

 the learning of the maze, the final running was not so rapid 

 as if the habit had been formed wholly under kinaesthetic 

 guidance. 



Some curious results have been observed when the maze 

 is rotated through angles of 90, 180, or 270 degrees. Since 

 this has no effect on any of the paths, but only on the 

 relation of the entire maze to its environment, it ought not 

 to disturb animals which are depending entirely on their 

 own movements for their cues, yet apparently it does in 

 some cases disturb them (767). Possibly the preliminary 

 swings which the animal gets in being picked up and intro- 

 duced to the entrance of the maze are the disturbing factor. 

 Hunter (349) found that some of his pigeons were disturbed 

 when the maze was rotated, while others were not, and 

 concludes that the latter were guided by cues within the 

 maze, the former by cues from without. 



Maze experiments are not the only observations on ani- 

 mals which reveal the existence of successive movement 

 systems, or " kinaesthetic memory." If Pieron (579) is 



