The animal mind; a text-book of comparative psychology, by Margaret Floy Washburn.

Abstract

Within these limits, the collection of references upon no topic is as full as would be necessary for the bibliography of a special research upon that topic. Doubtless there are omissions for which no excuse can be found. In one or two cases, where the literature upon a single point is very large, as for example, in the case of the function of the semicircular canals, only a few of the more important references have been given.One further comment may be made. The book throughout deals with comparative rather than with genetic psychology.I gratefully acknowledge help from a number of sources.To Professor Titchener I owe, not only my share of that genuine psychological spirit which he so successfully imparts to his pupils according to their ability, but various helpful criticisms upon the present work, about half of which he has read in manuscript. Dr. Yerkes has given me much invaluable aid in securing access to material, and has very kindly permitted me to see the proofs of his book on "The Dancing Mouse." As editor of the series he has reviewed my manuscript to its great advantage. Professors Georges Bohn and George H. Parker have showed especial courtesy in making their work accessible to me. Professor Jennings has kindly allowed the use of a number of illustrations from his book on "The Behavior of the Lower Organisms." My colleague Professor Aaron L. Treadwell has generously helped me in ways too numerous to specify. But perhaps my heaviest single obligation is to Professor I. Madison Bentley, who has read the manuscript of the entire book, and whose advice and criticism have been of the utmost benefit to every part of it. M. F. W. VASSAR COLLEGE, POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. October i, 1907.TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I THE DIFFICULTIES AND METHODS OF COMPARATIVE PSY-CHOLOGY PAGES i. Difficulties. 2. Methods of obtaining Facts: Anecdote. 3. Methods of obtaining Facts: Experiment. 4. Methods of Qbtaining Facts : the Ideal Method. 5. Methods of Interpreting Facts . . 1-26 CHAPTER II THE EVIDENCE OF MIND 6. Inferring Mind from Behavior. 7. Inferring Mind from Structure 27-36 CHAPTER III THE MIND OF THE SIMPLEST ANIMALS 8. The Structure and Behavior of Amreba. 9. The Mind of Amoeba. 10. The Structure and Behavior of Paramecium. 11. The Mind of Paramecium. 12. Definitions of Tropisms 37~S7 CHAPTER IV SENSORY DISCRIMINATION: METHODS OF INVESTIGATION 13. Preliminary Considerations. 14. Structure as Evidence of Discrimination. 15. Behavior as Evidence of Discrimination. 16. Evidence from Structure and Behavior Combined.

Multi-level computational methods for interdisciplinary research in the HathiTrust Digital Library

“…First, team members unfamiliar with the domain of comparative psychology were effectively guided towards highly relevant material in an unreadably large set of books. Second, team members were introduced to the work of Margaret Washburn, a pioneer of scientific comparative psychology, who wrote an important textbook of the early 20th Century [ 65 ]—a book that went through four editions in as many decades, but has been largely forgotten since then (although see [ 74 ] for a recent tribute). Third, close reading of the arguments in the HT 6 corpus revealed the surprising taxonomic range of these arguments, to include consideration even of consciousness in amoebae.…”

“…To further investigate the utility of combining distant reading methods with close reading, we applied topic modeling to the sentences within a single volume. For this test we selected Margaret Washburn’s The Animal Mind textbook [ 65 ] because it was top-ranked for topical content in HT 6. We applied LDA topic modeling to its 17,544 sentences, treating this set of sentences as a collection of documents.…”

A crisis in comparative psychology: where have all the undergraduates gone?

“…Examples include the work of Washburn (1908); Watson (1914); Keller (1937); Warden (1928), and those of the neo-behaviorists such as Abram Amsel, Clark Hull, Neal Miller, O. H. Mower, Kenneth Spence, and Edward Tolman, (Abramson, 2013). A similar connection can be found in the comparative texts of Warden et al (1935); Stone (1951); Denny and Ratner (1970); Razran (1971); Lester (1973) and the out of print Comparative Psychology: A Handbook edited by Greenberg and Haraway (1998).…”

Unnatural Selection: Comment on the “Teaching Comparative Psychology” Symposium

“…The notions that evolution was a worthv epistemology and that animal behavior was related to human behavior were to be found in highly specialized works that were of little standing interest to psychology (Alverdes, 1927;Baldwin, 1902;Romanes, 1889;Washburn, 1908). None of these texts showed any interest in animal life, comparative psychology, or evolution as a guiding principle.…”