Teaching Rats To Drive Tiny Cars Helps Them Relax, Scientists Discover
A bunch of rats has learned the way to drive tiny vehicles around to choose up food. How did this unlikely scenario come around, you're little question asking? Well, for a surprisingly interesting reason, actually.
Researchers from the University of Richmond in Virginia used the vehicle-driving rodents to indicate that an enriched environment can improve cognitive function and help sharpen the power to find out complex tasks. They also demonstrated that the mastery of an advanced skill can reduce levels of stress and help the rodents sit back.
“The findings that the animals housed in an exceedingly complex environment had more efficient learning within the driving task confirms that the brain could be a plastic organ that's molded by our experiences to some extent,” Dr. Kelly Lambert, study author and professor of Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Richmond, told IFLScience.
“I tell my students that they're in control of what they are doing with their brains a day of their lives – tougher and enriching lifestyles cause more complex neural networks.”
As reported within the journal Behavioural Brain Research, the rats were presented with a rodent operated vehicle (ROV) consisting of a plastic jar on electric-powered wheels that they may move forward or steer sideways by touching a copper bar. Understandably, this can be a fairly complex task for a rodent to find out, requiring all manner of cognitive, motor, and visuospatial skills they wouldn’t usually employ together. Nevertheless, after some practice, they were able to successfully navigate around a narrow arena towards a tasty reward, a brilliant sugary Froot Loop cereal.
Out of the 11 rats tested, six were housed in standard laboratory cages, while the remaining five got the luxurious of an “enriched environment,” including different toys, and closely resembled their natural habitat.
As hypothesized, the animals living within the enriched environment performed better at the driving test, indicating that they did a more robust job at learning a brand new complex skill. The enriched rats also maintained a powerful interest within the car, even after the reward of food was removed.
On the opposite hand, the researchers were surprised at the dearth of interest shown by the non-enriched rats and their level of underachievement shown within the driving task.
The rats' poop was also tested for levels of two hormones, corticosterone, which may be a marker of stress, and dehydroepiandrosterone, which helps control stress. All of the rats' feces showed increasing dehydroepiandrosterone and decreasing corticosterone as their driving training continued. This suggested that each one of the animals within the study, no matter the housing group, lessen stressed after they'd mastered the complex skill.
Obviously, this study was disbursed on rodents, so we should always watch out to not jump to any conclusions. However, the study could hold some interesting implications when it involves animals' environment and their psychological state.
“It reminds us that we will use challenging tasks with preclinical animal work to find out more about human challenging behavior and cognitive systems,” Lambert added. “We also see that the rats had healthier stress hormone profiles with driving training. we predict this learning task and operating the ROV could also be an animal model for agency or self-efficacy – two elements that are critical for psychological state.”
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