ABSTRACT
There are grave difficulties connected with this notion of secondary re-inforcement, but the author shall not discuss them here, for they are not central to the issue of spatial orientation. An issue is therefore posed by spatial orientation learning which did not arise in connexion with discrimination learning, but which is nevertheless of fundamental importance. Thus the animals in Ritchie's spatial orientation experiment, when the apparatus had been reversed, tended to go towards the wall where they had been fed rather than taking the direct path to the exact point on the wall. The theory has been applied mostly to problems of spatial orientation and maze learning, and a machine has been constructed with some of the features, which is said to exhibit 'insightful behaviour'. Deutsch accounts for the effects of learning on behaviour in terms of a hierarchy of cues which the animal picks up on the learning trials.
