Talk:The Behavioral Science Maze

== Notes from ''World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men'' ==
Rebecca Lemov
New York: Hill and Wang
2005

[p. 29] Rats were introduced into the first miniature mazes at Clark University in the late 1890s, a decade or so before Freud gave his debut American lecture there. Two researchers, Linus Kline and Willard Small, wanted to create a more natural situation than Edward L. Thorndike's renowned "puzzle boxes" from the same years. The puzzle box was a device requiring a solution, a wire-mesh contraption with various pulleys and levers that the creature inside had to operate to exit and get some food. The Clark researchers wanted something less devicelike, more like the burrows of wild rats. Small then reconstructed an environment in which rats could live, with food at the center. He designed it after the Hampton Court Palace maze, a trapezoidal hedge maze that dates in its present form to 1690 but was probably built in the early sixteenth century by the first owner of the palace, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. It is not clear why the two researchers chose this particular design, for there were many such mazes all over Europe, relics of an aristocratic vogue for running among hedges in pursuit of amusement. In these early experiments, the Hampton Court maze-in-miniature served as a pied-à-terre in which rats lived and took exercise when they were not being studied. Only later, under [John B.] Watson, would the [p. 30 begins] maze become itself a problem that had to be solved. The Clark program eventually died off, and by the turn of the century Chicago was the only place left with rats in labs. There the tradition was maintained unbroken until the great surge of rat research in the mid-1910s and early 1920s.

[p. 30] [John B. Watson] built his own mazes, which were much simpler than the Clark researchers' Hampton Court design, and set a standard in the field, for they tested the rat within the maze itself.

[Sense organs of rats were removed, they could still run mazes. Some outcry about cruelty. p. 30]

[Watson was youngest person to get a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, in 1903. p. 33]


Scott 1931 article in Psych. journal: "The Hampton Court Maze"