48 JOSEPH PETERSON 



is needed. There is no delay at the entrance. Work has come 

 to mean invariable accomplishment and reward. The entire 

 attack upon the new problem is aggressive. The learner has 

 learned to do by doing." The proper emotional attitude, the 

 last of the general factors, means the overcoming of an attitude 

 complex, " a mixture of fear, indecision, curiosity, and perhaps 

 anger." All this after some really valuable experiments ! Surely 

 this is only a complication in subjective terms of facts to be 

 accounted for, which facts practically all authorities are willing 

 to accept more or less completely. These " factors " of transfer 

 do not take us anywhere. 



Dr. Peckstein finds 26 that the difhcultness of mazes is not 

 proportional to their lengths, nor to the number of their blind 

 alleys. But why should it be? As to the number of cul de 

 sacs, it is obvious that if at first a rat tends in its " choices " at 

 bifurcations to follow chance laws — and our present results 

 point that way — difhcultness ought to increase on some other 

 principle. The probability of passing any single cul de sac 

 successfully is 3/4, as Watson has pointed out, i. e., if we mean 

 by " successfully " that the animal either goes on in the correct 

 path, or, if it enters the blind alley, that on emergence from it 

 it keeps the general forward direction. The chance of passing 

 two blind alleys is therefore 9/16 (= 3/4 x 3/4) ; that of passing 

 three cul de sacs, (3/4) 3 ; and so on. On this basis the chance 

 of getting through one unit of Peckstein 's maze — 3 blind alleys 

 — is (3/4) 3 , while that of getting through the entire maze without 

 a return is (3/4) 12 . In the former case the probability of a 

 success without returns is therefore over thirteen times that 

 in the latter. Complications from returns at any cul de sac 

 will be brought about by additions of other forward movements 

 beyond the point to which return is made, but each of these 

 additional forward runs may again be assumed to follow, before 

 any training sets in, the same probability law at each cul de sac 

 that is followed in the original run. Thus the above calculation 

 may stand roughly as approximately correct. Its results — a 

 difhcultness of the whole maze of over thirteen times that of 

 the quarter maze — agrees more closely with Peckstein's actual 

 results, as estimated by him, than do those based on the 

 assumption of a direct proportionate increase in difhcultness 

 "Ibid., pp. 55-57. 



