Modification by Experience 255 



ceeding reds. As soon as the white appeared, however, 

 the animal would lean up against the front board, claw 

 down the white and blue, but never the final red." 



Now Cole thinks that the learning of this trick by the rac- 

 coons proved that "the animal retains an image of the cards 

 which just preceded red." The only alternate supposition 

 seems to him to be that they always reacted to the number 

 of the card in the series, which, if the series were irregularly 

 given, would not have been the same in successive trials. To 

 suggest one's own interpretation of animal behavior that one 

 has not seen, in the place of the experimenter's interpretation, 

 requires some temerity, but to the present writer the most 

 natural way of accounting for the raccoon's performances 

 would be the supposition that in the series white, blue, red, 

 for instance, at the end of which they were fed, the occurrence 

 of white threw them into a state of expectancy, of readiness 

 to climb up on the box ; this was heightened by the blue, and 

 finally "discharged" into action by the red. During this 

 process they may have had an anticipatory image of the 

 blue and of the red. But when the red came they did not 

 stop to call up memory images of the preceding colors, 

 and decline to act until they had assured themselves that 

 those were blue and white instead of red. Preparedness 

 to act was probably already secured by the actual occur- 

 rence of the white card at the beginning of the series. In 

 other words, while images may have been present, they 

 were images with a future, not a past reference. A human 

 being reacting to a series of stimuli in this fashion would 

 but rarely, in case his attention had wandered during the 

 giving of the first two stimuli, have to recall them as 

 memory images before reaction, but he might very likely 

 have anticipatory images of the stimuli to come while 

 waiting for them. For reasons that will be later men- 



