Rats Weight Cost and Benefit

Van den Bos, a scientist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and his tem text whether or not rat weight the cost of benefit when they forage for food like humans. For human, we will weigh the costs and the benefits of a situation before making decisions to buy something or get something. We always comparer the value of the item and the cost of it before decide to buy it or not. And Van den Bos tried to see if rat think like human on decisions making.

He and his team used Wistar rats as the object of this experiment. They first put the Wistar rats at the bottom of the T-shaped maze, and then they set up one arm of the maze with low reward but easily to get to, while the other arm of the maze with high reward but had to climb steep barriers to get to. By using this maze, he and his team can conclude whether Wistar rats do decisions making or not.

At first the Wistar rats will go for the low reward but when they notice there is high reward on the other arm, they will go for higher reward even they need to go though obstacles. But when the pain yields too little reward with too much effect, they will go back to the low reward instead. And the result of this experiment is that Wistar rats do weigh costs and benefits of a situation before making decisions to go which way.

Animal Planet News --Study: Rats Weight Cost and Benefit
http://animal.discovery.com/news/briefs/20060612/smartrat.html

Posted By: Kyle Chiang (9)