Title: A Group of Young Chimpanzees in a One-Acre Field1 1The collection of data for this chapter was supported by grant FR-00164 from the National Institutes of Health to the Delta Regional Primate Research Center of Tulane University, the writing of this chapter by National Science Foundation grant GU-3850 to the Psychobiology Program of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Without the encouragement and advice of William A. Mason, Arthur J. Riopelle, Helmut Hofer, and Hans Kummer some of…
Abstract: This chapter discusses a group of young chimpanzees in a one-acre field. Three decades ago, Tolman declared that distance and direction are the fundamental concepts of behavior and that all of the important problems of psychology, save perhaps those involving language and society, could eventually be understood in essence by the analysis of the behavior of a rat at a choice point of a maze. Certainly, species variables are more important than the behaviorists of the 1930s admitted, and the maze is an arbitrary and possibly distorted model of the universe. Tolman's lone rat has simply evolved into a group of chimpanzees; the choice-point of a maze has become any given point in an outdoor area as large as the author could reasonably control and survey as a whole with the techniques at his disposal. The major advantage of a spatial, geometrical, or mechanical approach to nature is that its questions, methods, and concepts fully utilize the complexity of the real world in their very construction but are themselves extremely simple and general.
Publication Year: 1974
Publication Date: 1974-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 126
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