AbstractsPsychology

Some fifty years ago, Thorndike, (11), Small, (10), KLine, (5), and others, began systematically to study psychological aspects of animal behaviour. These early investigators used various kinds of mazes and problem boxes to describe the variables under examination. Since these pioneer attempts, new mazes and problem boxes have been designed, and a great deal of the research carried on in the field of comparative psychology has involved mazes of one type or another. A different “type of maze, designed by Hebb and Williams, (3), to evaluate rat intelligence, has provided the most recent improvement in animal testing apparatus. This thesis reports the development of an improvement of the Hebb and Williams intelligence test, and presents measures of reliability and validity for the use of this procedure and apparatus. The traditional procedure in the evaluation of rat intelligence is to test the animal’s learning ability in a maze and infer from this behaviour the animal’s level of intelligence. “While the mazes and problem boxes used in this procedure vary greatly in design, they all have certain characteristic disadvantages.[...]