I noticed something interesting: in Google Scholar, when you punch in Young as author and the reasonable search terms ‘rat’ ‘maze’ ‘sand’ restricted to before Feynman’s lecture, only 3 items pop up.
(Frustratingly, Young wrote a whole textbook on rats/mice available on the Internet Archive—the year before Feynman says he did the experiment! Another textbook, Emotion in man and animal: its nature and dynamic basis, isn’t on IA but is in Google Books; checking it with a few keywords like ‘sand’ and ‘smell’ and ‘third’, doesn’t seem to throw up any particularly good hits.)
Emotion in man and animal can now be read on Hathitrust: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000426365 Checking the ToC doesn’t turn up anything relevant, and an additional search for ‘maze’ shows some maze-running mice experiments but not the one in question.
I wonder if it’s possible this is the wrong Young? It is not that rare a US surname (far from it, #28 in 1990). Thinking about it, isn’t calling him “Mr. Young” a little odd? P.T. Young definitely had a PhD and was a tenured professor, so it’s a bit disrespectful to not refer to him as ‘Dr Young’ or Professor Young’. (And some quick skimming doesn’t turn up any obvious connections between Young’s University of Illinois and Feynman, so how did he hear of it?)
I noticed something interesting: in Google Scholar, when you punch in Young as author and the reasonable search terms ‘rat’ ‘maze’ ‘sand’ restricted to before Feynman’s lecture, only 3 items pop up.
I don’t have access to the 3, so I’ve requested them: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ji3/lesswrong_help_desk_free_paper_downloads_and_more/auye
(Frustratingly, Young wrote a whole textbook on rats/mice available on the Internet Archive—the year before Feynman says he did the experiment! Another textbook, Emotion in man and animal: its nature and dynamic basis, isn’t on IA but is in Google Books; checking it with a few keywords like ‘sand’ and ‘smell’ and ‘third’, doesn’t seem to throw up any particularly good hits.)
Emotion in man and animal can now be read on Hathitrust: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000426365 Checking the ToC doesn’t turn up anything relevant, and an additional search for ‘maze’ shows some maze-running mice experiments but not the one in question.
I wonder if it’s possible this is the wrong Young? It is not that rare a US surname (far from it, #28 in 1990). Thinking about it, isn’t calling him “Mr. Young” a little odd? P.T. Young definitely had a PhD and was a tenured professor, so it’s a bit disrespectful to not refer to him as ‘Dr Young’ or Professor Young’. (And some quick skimming doesn’t turn up any obvious connections between Young’s University of Illinois and Feynman, so how did he hear of it?)