ABSTRACT
The psychologists Jack Bernard and Lester W. Sontag once tested fetal response to sound by placing a loudspeaker close to the mother’s abdomen. One psychologist reported in a footnote to a test resume that a particularly alert baby had spotted his eye at a peephole and consistently watched the watcher instead of the crib toy that was supposed to engage the attention of the babies in the experiment. Another investigator recorded 71 instances out of 168 trials during which his young subjects were fretting, crying, or too sleepy for him to be sure what their reaction to his test situation was. Learning, most textbooks say, is "a process which brings about a lasting change in an individual's behavior as a result of contact with the environment." E. Roy John and several colleagues at New York Medical College's Brain Research Laboratories have reported that cats learn by observation too.
