Friday, October 12, 2007

Smart Rats:

Studies show that rats like some humans actually consider problems by weighing the costs and benefits of a situation before taking action. This study was conducted on Wistar rats, a rodent specifically developed for research. This is the first study that actually shows that other animals apart from humans have the ability to actually think over problems and create standards to decide which situation requires more concern and which situation yields better rewards, etc.

The example used in the article is a simple one of a person buying a new car. There are many things a person considers before buying a new car. They need to see if they money they actually pay (the cost of the product) is worth the value of the car. And they believe that all rodents do something very similar except they are under a lot of pressure when they are making the decisions.

"In its natural habitat, rats are facing the problem that little is under their control, so they are facing various levels and forms of uncertainty all the time," said Ruud van den Bos, who led the research. An example of this might be that when they are searching for food in different patches, these patches usually do not yield the same rewards that they want. They have different types of food and so the amount of energy they might spend to obtain these food items will definitely differ greatly. Also they change their behavior in searching for food depending on the type of foraging season or just depending on the weather.

The researcher and his team tried to replicate these different types of situations to get a better idea of how the rats worked. They manipulated barriers in a T-shaped maze that rats explored. Rats entered at the bottom of the "T," which connected two arms.

At the end of each arm was a chamber filled with treats. One side had less amount of reward, maybe just one of two sugar pellets while the other side had a larger amount of about five sugar pellets. But the challenge they were posed with was that if they needed the larger reward, they needed to climb higher barriers to reach them. Now the rats were faced with the question of is it really worth climbing such high barrier for these sugar pellets? And as predicted, the rats first started out with trying to get the lower rewards, but once they realized that there were higher rewards if the barrier was climbed, they tried with all their might to try and get the reward. So in this case the rats decided that the benefit here was worth the cost.

“These findings have been reviewed for publication in the journal Behavioral Brain Research.”

Source: http://animal.discovery.com/news/briefs/20060612/smartrat.html

Posted by:
Swetha Raghavan. (3)

2 Comments:

At 9:04 PM, Blogger PWH said...

This is a very interesting article. I think it was such a simple thing that we might overlook, but it is very logical. Do you know if this type of activity is prevalent only to rats or has this kind of research been done on other animals? Also this blog only mentioned one type of experiment they did to test the rat's behavior. Does this article talk about any more of such experiments? Either way I think this article was very interesting and nicely written.

Posted by
Kirubakaran Sivagurunathan.

 
At 11:31 AM, Blogger PWH said...

This is a very interesting article. It is interesting that rats have the ability to think of the benefits they have. They are willing to go the extra mile to have that treat. I am interested to know what other tests were done on the rats. Do rats have other conceptual capabilities? Overall this article is interesting. Well done!

Posted By:
Nelina Bridge (3)

 

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