REWARD AND PUNISHMENT IN HABIT FORMATION 271 



That the animal in the performance of an act is constantly in a state 

 of muscular tension due to mutually reinforcing, mutually inhibiting 

 tendencies and that these tensions are released only when the proper 

 reactions have been made and the desired act been performed. 



Haggerty gives a physiological interpretation of the learning 

 process in the following law (3) : 



A physiological state is not self-contained but tends to radiate to 

 other physiological states both those which form with it a series of 

 states like a habit chain and also to other physiological states which 

 have never formed a series. 



Frequency. That the frequency of repetition of a desired act 

 is of value in perfecting the habit may hardly be successfully 

 denied, but that it is a dynamic factor may be doubted. Its 

 importance varies with the nature of the habit and the motive 

 used for promoting the learning process. That it fails to offer 

 anything like a complete explanation for habit formation is shown 

 by the following facts: (1) It took rats trained with a shock 

 of seventy-five units an average frequency of 24 right choices 

 to 14 wrong while it took rats trained with twenty-four hours 

 of hunger a frequency of 85 right choices to 42 wrong to per- 

 fect the same habit. (2) It required subjects trained with a 

 shock of sixty units an average frequency of 51 right choices to 

 23 wrong choices while it took subjects trained with seventy-five 

 units an average frequency of 24 right to 14 wrong choices to 

 perfect the same habit. (3) It required subjects trained with 

 forty-one hours of hunger an average frequency of 45 right 

 choices to 23 wrong while it required those subjects trained with 

 twenty-four hours of hunger an average frequency of 85 right to 

 42 wrong choices to perfect the habit. Thus we see that the 

 proportion of right to wrong choices is greater in all cases where it 

 took the subject a greater number of trials to complete the learn- 

 ing process. 



Recency. The importance of recency as a factor in the for- 

 mation of a habit, varies like that of frequency, with the nature 

 of the habit. But it does not help to explain the differences in 

 the results in this experiment. The recency in all series of ex- 



