A SIMPLE MAZE 357 



The saving of time is probably of less importance than these 

 figures suggest, for a great deal of time is consumed in placing 

 the animals in the starting compartment, in waiting for them to 

 enter the maze, in recording their behavior, and in caring for 

 them between training periods, so that the time spent in actual 

 training is only a small per cent of that demanded by experi- 

 mental work. Even so, the item of 40 minutes saved in the 

 training of each animal is not be to neglected. 



It seems then that the simple maze offers a dependable method 

 of comparing individual differences in learning ability, not inferior 

 to that provided by training in more complex habits, and that it 

 affords a significant economy of the experimenter's time. 



II. DATA ON THE EFFECTS OF THE TEMPORAL DISTRIBUTION OF 



PRACTICE 



The relative simplicity of the habits that must be formed for 

 the accurate running of the simple maze has made it possible to 

 distinguish certain types of behavior which seem correlated with 

 the effects of the temporal distribution of practice and may con- 

 tribute something to our knowledge of the way in which long 

 practice periods retard habit-formation in the rat. The experi- 

 ment was originally planned to test the effects of a variety of 

 methods of training other than variations in the distribution of 

 practice. The unexpected result appeared that the diverse 

 methods of training produced different effects, conditioned by the 

 distribution of practice, and it is in these different effects that the 

 chief interest of the experiment lies. 



For training the animals were divided into four groups with 

 which diverse methods of training were used. With one of the 

 groups (A) the customary methods of training were employed. 

 Food was placed in the end of one alley (fig. 1, e). The animals 

 were confined in the end of this alley and fed there on three 

 days preceding training. During training they were allowed to 

 reach the food at every trial; that is, to correct errors made in 

 the cul de sac. 



