Excerpt from The Delayed Reaction in Animals and Children, Vol. 2
The nature of the present experiment may be further set forth by contrasting it with the following type of adjustment: A cat watches for a mouse and sees it appear at an open hole. The mouse vanishes before the cat can react, yet the cat goes over to the hole. T here can be no question here but’that the determining stimulus is absent at the moment of response, pro vided possible olfactory stimuli be neglected. Our experiment differs from this in complexity. If there were three holes that differed only in their several directions from the cat, and if in the past the mouse had appeared an equal number of times in all three holes, the conditions would be the same as in our tests. A selection between the three ho’les would need to be made on the basis of the immediately previous presence of the rat, if a correct reaction were to occur. If an animal can manifest behavior that does not lend itself to a stimulus and response explanation, this is one type of situation in which that behavior should appear. That, in fact, it is the situation par excellence for the eliciting of this behavior will, I believe, appear as this monograph progresses.
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