The Dancing Mouse: A Study in Animal Behavior

Published in 1907, this pioneering study documents Yerkes's meticulous investigation into the 'dancing mouse,' a strain of mice exhibiting compulsive circling behavior due to a genetic mutation. What begins as casual observation at Harvard's Psychological Laboratory evolves into a rigorous examination of sensory perception, learning capacity, and motor function in these remarkable creatures. Yerkes meticulously documents his experiments, probing the mice's responses to various stimuli while grappling with fundamental questions about animal intelligence that would shape the emerging field of comparative psychology. Though written in the formal scientific prose of its era, the work crackles with the excitement of discovery: here was a living puzzle, a creature whose very neurology could illuminate broader principles of behavior and mind. This volume stands as a window into the birth of experimental animal behavior science, and the dancing mouse mutation Yerkes described remains a subject of neuroscientific research today.