Animal intelligence: Experimental studies

To the intelligent man with an interest in human nature it must often appear strange that so much of the energy of the scientific world has been spent on the study of the body and so little on the study of the mind. ‘The greatest thing in man is mind,’ he might say, ‘yet the least studied.’ Especially remarkable seems the rarity of efforts to trace the evolution of the human intellect from that of the lower animals. Since Darwin’s discovery, the beasts of the field, the fowl of the air and the fish of the sea have been examined with infinite pains by hundreds of workers in the effort to trace our physical genealogy, and with consummate success; yet few and far between have been the efforts to find the origins of intellect and trace its progress up to human faculty. And none of them has achieved any secure success.

It may be premature to try again, but a somewhat extended series of studies of the intelligent behavior of fishes, reptiles, birds and mammals, including the monkeys, which it has been my lot to carry out during the last five years, has brought results which seem to throw light on the problem and to suggest its solution.

Experiments have been made on fishes, reptiles, birds and various mammals, notably dogs, cats, mice and monkeys, to see how they learned to do certain simple things in order to get food. All these animals manifest fundamentally the same sort of intellectual life. Their learning is after the same general type. What that type is can be seen best from a concrete instance. A monkey was kept in a large cage. Into the cage was put a box, the door of which was held closed by a wire fastened to a nail which was inserted in a hole in the top of the box. If the nail was pulled up out of the hole, the door could be pulled open. In this box was a piece of banana. The monkey, attracted by the new object, came down from the top of the cage and fussed over the box. He pulled at the wire, at the door, and at the bars in the front of the box. He pushed the box about and tipped it up and down. He played with the nail and finally pulled it out. When he happened to pull the door again, of course it opened. He reached in and got the food inside. It had taken him 36 minutes to get in. Another piece of food being put in and the door closed, the occurrences of the first trial were repeated, but there was less of the profitless pulling and tipping. He got in this time in 2 minutes and 20 seconds. With repeated trials the animal finally came to drop entirely the profitless acts and to take the nail out and open the door as soon as the box was put in his cage. He had, we should say, learned to get in.

The process involved in the learning was evidently a process of selection. The animal is confronted by a state of affairs or, as we may call it, a ‘situation.’ He reacts in the way that he is moved by his innate nature or previous training to do, by a number of acts. These acts include the particular act that is appropriate and he succeeds. In later trials the impulse to this one act is more and more stamped in, this one act is more and more associated with that situation, is selected from amongst the others by reason of the pleasure it brings the animal. The profitless acts are stamped out; the impulses to perform them in that situation are weakened by reason of the positive discomfort or the absence of pleasure resulting from them. So the animal finally performs in that situation only the fitting act.

Here we have the simplest and at the same time the most widespread sort of intellect or learning in the world. There is no reasoning, no process of inference or comparison; there is no thinking about things, no putting two and two together; there are no ideas—the animal does not think of the box or of the food or of the act he is to perform. He simply comes after the learning to feel like doing a certain thing under certain circumstances which before the learning he did not feel like doing. Human beings are accustomed to think of intellect as the power of having and controlling ideas and of ability to learn as synonymous with ability to have ideas. But learning by having ideas is really one of the rare and isolated events in nature. There may be a few scattered ideas possessed by the higher animals, but the common form of intelligence with them, their habitual method of learning, is not by the acquisition of ideas, but by the selection of impulses.

Indeed this same type of learning is found in man. When we learn to drive a golf ball or play tennis or billiards, when we learn to tell the price of tea by tasting it or to strike a certain note exactly with the voice, we do not learn in the main by virtue of any ideas that are explained to us, by any inferences that we reason out. We learn by the gradual selection of the appropriate act or judgment, by its association with the circumstances or situation requiring it, in just the way that the animals do.

From the lowest animals of which we can affirm intelligence up to man this type of intellect is found. With it there are in the mammals obscure traces of the ideas which come in the mental life of man to outweigh and hide it. But it is the basal fact. As we follow the development of animals in time, we find the capacity to select impulses growing. We find the associations thus made between situation and act growing in number, being formed more quickly, lasting longer and becoming more complex and more delicate. The fish can learn to go to certain places, to take certain paths, to bite at certain things and refuse others, but not much more. It is an arduous proceeding for him to learn to get out of a small pen by swimming up through a hole in a screen. The monkey can learn to do all sorts of things. It is a comparatively short and easy task for him to learn to get into a box by unhooking a hook, pushing a bar around and pulling out a plug. He learns quickly to climb down to a certain place when he sees a letter T on a card and to stay still when he sees a K. He performs the proper acts nearly as well after 50 days as he did when they were fresh in his mind.

This growth in the number, speed of formation, permanence, delicacy and complexity of associations possible for an animal reaches its acme in the case of man. Even if we leave out of question the power of reasoning, the possession of a multitude of ideas and abstractions and the power of control over impulses, purposive action, man is still the intellectual leader of the animal kingdom by virtue of the superior development in him of the power of forming associations between situations or sense-impressions and acts, by virtue of the degree to which the mere learning by selection possessed by all intelligent animals has advanced. In man the type of intellect common to the animal kingdom finds its fullest development, and with it is combined the hitherto nonexistent power of thinking about things and rationally directing action in accord with thought.

Indeed it may be that this very reason, self-consciousness and self-control which seem to sever human intellect so sharply from that of all other animals are really but secondary results of the tremendous increase in the number, delicacy and complexity of associations which the human animal can form. It may be that the evolution of intellect has no breaks, that its progress is continuous from its first appearance to its present condition in adult civilized human beings. If we could prove that what we call ideational life and reasoning were not new and unexplainable species of intellectual life but only the natural consequences of an increase in the number, delicacy, and complexity of associations of the general animal sort, we should have made out an evolution of mind comparable to the evolution of living forms.

In 1890 William James wrote, “The more sincerely one seeks to trace the actual course of psychogenesis, the steps by which as a race we may have come by the peculiar mental attributes which we possess, the more clearly one perceives ‘the slowly gathering twilight close in utter dark.’” Can we perhaps prove him a false prophet? Let us first see if there be any evidence that makes it probable that in some way or another the mere extension of the animal type of intellect has produced the human sort. If we do, let us proceed to seek a possible account of how this might have happened, and finally to examine any evidence that shows this possible ‘how’ to have been the real way in which human reason has evolved.

It has already been shown that in the animal kingdom there is, as we pass from the early vertebrates down to man, a progress in the evolution of the general associative process which practically equals animal intellect, that this progress continues as we pass from the monkeys to man. Such a progress is a real fact; it does exist as a possible vera causa; it is thus at all events better than some imaginary cause of the origin of human intellect, the very existence of which is in doubt. In a similar manner we know that the neurones, which compose the brain and the connections between which are the physiological parallels of the habits that animals form, show, as we pass down through the vertebrate series, an evolution along lines of increased delicacy and complexity. That an animal associates a certain act with a certain felt situation means that he forms or strengthens connections between certain cells. The increase in number, delicacy and complexity of cell structures is thus the basis for an increase in the number, delicacy and complexity of associations. Now the evolution noted in cell structures affects man as well as the other vertebrates. He stands at the head of the scale in that respect as well. May not this obvious supremacy in the animal type of intellect and in the adaption of his brain to it be at the bottom of his supremacy in being the sole possessor of reasoning?

This question becomes more pressing if we realize that we must have some sort of brain correlate for ideational life and reasoning. Some sort of difference in processes in the brain must be at the basis of the mental differences between man and the lower animals, we should all admit. And it would seem wise to look for that difference amongst differences which really do or at least may exist. Now the most likely brain difference between man and the lower animals for our purpose, to my mind indeed the only likely one, is just this difference in the fineness of organization of the cell structures. If we could show with any degree of probability how it might account for the presence of ideas and of reasoning, we should at least have the satisfaction of dealing with a cause actually known to exist.

The next important fact is that the intellect of the infant six months to a year old is of the animal sort, that ideational and reasoning life are not present in his case, that the only obvious intellectual difference between him and a monkey is in the quantity and quality of the associations formed. In the evolution of the infant’s mind to its adult condition we have the actual transition within an individual from the animal to the human type of intellect. If we look at the infant and ask what is in him to make in the future a thinker and reasoner, we must answer either by invoking some mysterious capacity, the presence of which we cannot demonstrate, or by taking the difference we actually do find. That is the difference in the quality and quantity of associations of the animal sort. Even if we could never see how it came to cause the future intellectual life, it would seem wiser to believe that it did than to resort to faith in mysteries. Surely there is enough evidence to make it worth while to ask our second question, “How might this difference cause the life of ideas and reasoning?”

To answer this question fully would involve a most intricate treatment of the whole intellectual life of man, a treatment which cannot be attempted without reliance on technical terms and psychological formulas. A fairly comprehensible account of the general features of such an answer can, however, be given. The essential thing about the thinking of the animals is that they feel things in gross. The kitten who learned to respond differently to the signals, “I must feed those cats” and “I will not feed them,” felt each signal as a vague total, including the tone, the movements of my head, etc. It did not have an idea of the sound of I, another of the sound of must, another of the sound feed, etc. It did not turn the complex impression into a set of elements, but felt it, as I have said, in gross. The dog that learned to get out of a box by pulling a loop of wire did not feel the parts of the box separately, the bolt as a definite circle of a certain size, did not feel his act as a sum of certain particular movements. The monkey who learned to know the letter K from the letter Y did not feel the separate lines of the letter, have definite ideas of the parts. He just felt one way when he saw one total impression and another way when he saw another.

Strictly human thinking, on the contrary, has as its essential characteristic the breaking up of gross total situations into feelings of particular facts. When in the presence of ten jumping tigers we not only feel like running, but also feel the number of tigers, their color, their size, etc. When, instead of merely associating some act with some situation in the animal way, we think the situation out, we have a set of particular feelings of its elements. In some cases, it is true, we remain restricted to the animal sort of feelings. The sense impressions of suffocation, of the feeling of a new style of clothes, of the pressure of 10 feet of water above us, of malaise, of nausea and such like remain for most of us vague total feelings to which we react and which we feel most acutely but which do not take the form of definite ideas that we can isolate or combine or compare. Such feelings we say are not parts of our real intellectual life. They are parts of our intellectual life if we mean by it the mental life concerned in learning, but they are not if we mean by it the life of reasoning.

Can we now see how the vague gross feelings of the animal sort might turn into the well-defined particular ideas of the human sort, by the aid of a multitude of delicate associations?

It seems to be a general law of mind that any mental element which occurs with a number of different mental elements, appears, that is, in a number of different combinations, tends to thereby acquire an independent life of its own. We show children six lines, six dots, six peas, six pieces of paper, etc., and thus create the definite feeling of sixness. Out of the gross feelings of a certain number of lines, of dots, etc., we evolve the definite elementary feeling of sixness by making the ‘six’ aspect of the situations appear in a number of different connections. We learn to feel whiteness as a definite idea by seeing white paper, white cloth, white eggs, white plates, etc. We learn to feel the meaning of but or in or notwithstanding by feeling the meanings of many total phrases containing each of them. Now in this general law by which different associates for the same elementary process elevate it out of its position as an undifferentiated fragment of a gross total feeling, we have, I think, the manner in which the vague feelings of the nine-months-old infant become the definite ideas of the five-year-old boy, the manner in which in the race the animal mind has evolved into the human, and the explanation of the service performed by the increase in the delicacy of structure of the human brain and the consequent increase in the number of associations.

The bottle to the six-months-old infant is a vague sense-impression which the infant does not think about or indeed in the common meanings of the words perceive or remember or imagine. Its presence does not arouse ideas, but action. It is not to him a thing so big, or so shaped, or so heavy, but is just a vaguely sizable thing to be reached for, grabbed and sucked. Like the lower animals, with the exception that as he grows a little older he reacts in very many more ways, the child feels things in gross in a way to lead to direct reactions. Vague sense-impressions and impulses make up his mental life. The bottle, which to a dog would be a thing to smell at and paw, to a kitten a thing to smell at and perhaps worry, is to the child a little later a thing to grab and suck and turn over and drop and pick up and pull at and finger and rub against its toes and so on. The sight of the bottle thus becomes associated with many different reactions, and thus by our general law tends to gain a position independent of any of them, to evolve from the condition of being a portion of the cycles see-grab, see-drop, see-turn over, etc., to the condition of being a definite idea.

The increased delicacy and complexity of the cell structures in the human brain give the possibility of very small parts of the brain-processes forming different connections, allow the brain to work in very great detail, provide processes ready to be turned into definite ideas. The great number of associations which the human being forms furnish the means by which this last event is consummated. The infant’s vague feelings of total situations are by virtue of the detailed working of his brain all ready to split up into parts, and his general activity and curiosity provide the multitude of different connections which allow them to do so. The dog, on the other hand, has few or no ideas because his brain acts in coarse fashion and because there are few connections with each single process.

When once the mind begins to function by having definite ideas, all the phenomena of reasoning soon appear. The transition from one idea to another is the feeling of their relationship, of similarity or difference or whatever it may be. As soon as we find any words or other symbols to express such a feeling, or to express our idea of an action or condition, we have explicit judgments. Observation of any child will show us that the mind cannot rest in a condition where it has a large body of ideas without comparing them and thinking about them. The ideas carry within them the forces that make abstractions, feelings of similarity, judgments and other characteristics of reasoning.

In children two and three years of age we find all these elements of reasoning present and functioning. The product of children’s reasoning is often irrational, but the processes are all there. The following instances from a collection of children’s sayings by Mr. H. W. Brown show children making inductions and deductions after the same general fashion as adults:—

Nowhere in the animal kingdom do we find the psychological elements of reasoning save where there is a mental life made up of the definite feelings which I have called ‘ideas,’ but they spring up like magic as soon as we get in a child a body of such ideas. If we have traced satisfactorily the evolution of a life of ideas from the animal life of vague sense-impressions and impulses, we may be reasonably sure that no difficulty awaits us in following the life of ideas in its course from the chaotic dream of early childhood to the logical world-view of the adult scientist.

In a very short time we have come a long way, from the simple learning of the minnow or chick to the science and logic of man. The general frame of mind which one acquires from the study of animal behavior and of the mental development of young children makes our hypothesis seem vital and probable. If the facts did eventually corroborate it, we should have an eminently simple genesis of human faculty, for we could put together the gist of our contention in a few words. We should say:—

“The function of intellect is to provide a means of modifying our reactions to the circumstances of life, so that we may secure pleasure, the symptom of welfare. Its general law is that when in a certain situation an animal acts so that pleasure results, that act is selected from all those performed and associated with that situation, so that, when the situation recurs, the act will be more likely to follow than it was before; that on the contrary the acts which, when performed in a certain situation, have brought discomfort, tend to be dissociated from that situation. The intellectual evolution of the race consists in an increase in the number, delicacy, complexity, permanence and speed of formation of such associations. In man this increase reaches such a point that an apparently new type of mind results, which conceals the real continuity of the process. This mental evolution parallels the evolution of the cell structures of the brain from few and simple and gross to many and complex and delicate.”

Nowhere more truly than in his mental capacities is man a part of nature. His instincts, that is, his inborn tendencies to feel and act in certain ways, show throughout marks of kinship with the lower animals, especially with our nearest relatives physically, the monkeys. His sense-powers show no new creation. His intellect we have seen to be a simple though extended variation from the general animal sort. This again is presaged by the similar variation in the case of the monkeys. Amongst the minds of animals that of man leads, not as a demigod from another planet, but as a king from the same race.