Making the Right Decision, If You’re A Rat
It’s Friday night and you have an exam on Monday. Between then and now, you would like to study, but you have also been invited to a party and have a date to go on. To decide how to spend your weekend, you will have to weigh the cost of a lower exam grade with the benefit of getting out with your main squeeze and partying.
A study by Ruud van den Bos has recently determined that Wistar rats have the ability to make decisions like this also. Van den Bos and his staff set up a T-shaped track, with the two arms of the T having treats in both. The rat was released in the bottom of the T and left to choose which arm it would enter to eat the treats there. The trick is in the varying difficulty between the arms. One arm would have a straight path to a single treat, the other barriers to scale to get to a larger amount of treats. In each successive test, the toughness of the path over the barriers was varied. The rats would have to determine how much energy they were willing to spend to get treats. When the barriers were small, the rats went over them most of the time to get the large reward. But when the path was harder, the rats more often went to the other arm for the one treat. This meant that the rats decided the energy cost was too high to scale the barriers when they were steep.
Van den Bos’s team noticed that rats seem to have a set amount of energy they are willing to spend on a certain activity. This standard may be predetermined by genetics and also past experiences and decision making on the part of the rat.
Posted by Natural K (8)
posted by PWH @ 11:36 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Hey, I noticed the link to the study didn't work. Here is the link: here
Natural K
This study is very fascinating to me. I find it amazing that the rat has a set amount of energy that they are willing to use to find their food. This foraging behavior might also help decrease predation. They probably won’t move too far from their nests when they have a set energy limit.
Also, you might want to edit your main post on the blog page and insert the correct link to the article there too. People will be able to access it easier and not everyone knows that your correction is in comment area.
Posted by Chamel413 (8)
I found this entry very interesting as I work with rats for my thesis research. A fellow lab member is also currently doing research on rat "preference" for a drug (in this case MDMA). I would like to know more about the claim that the energy expenditure was controlled by genetics. Has research been done on this or did van den Bos just put it out there as a possibility? I think a genetic link that influence the decision making in rats would be pretty big but I have not heard of it before now.
Posted by LD
I think van den Bos was just kind of proposing the idea that genetics influenced decision making. The research team said, "rats seem to behave according to an internal constant standard." With the use of 'seem,' they don't seem to be sure about it.
The study was more about if rats make decisions weighing cost and benefit, not so much about what creates the internal standard by which they judge the worthwhileness of an action. More studies will have to be done about that, because it is interesting.
Posted by Natural K
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