Laws and Hypotheses for Behavior 249 
The electric shock administered just as an animal starts on 
the wrong path or touches the wrong mechanism, is potent, 
but the same punishment administered ten or twenty 
seconds after an act will have little or no effect upon that 
act. ‘ 
_Closestemporal sequence is not the only means of insuring 
the connection of the satisfaction with the response producing 
“it. |What is called attention to the response counts also. 
If a cat pushes a button around with its nose, while its main 
occupation, the act to which its general ‘set’ impels it, to 
which, we say, it is chiefly attentive, is that of clawing at 
an opening, it will be less aided in the formation of the habit 
than if it had been chiefly concerned in what its nose was 
doing. The successful response is as a rule only a part of all 
that the animal is doing at the time. In proportion as it 
is an eminent, emphatic part of it, learning is aided. Sim- 
ilarly discomfort eliminates most the eminent, emphatic 
features of the total response which it accompanies or 
shortly follows. 
‘The third factor, ‘the susceptibility of the response and 
situation to connection, is harder to illustrate. But, ap- 
parently, of those responses which are equally strongly con- 
nected with a situation by nature and equally attended to, 
some are more susceptible than others to a more intimate 
connection. : 
The things which have to be equal in the case of the law 
of exercise“are the force of satisfyingness; that is, the 
een are 7 
action of the law of effect, and again the readiness of 
the response to be connected with the situation. 
The operation of the laws of instinct, exercise and effect 
is conditioned further by (1) what may be called the law 
of assimilation or analogy, — that a situation, especially 
one to which no particular response is connected by original 
