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| A 'participant' in Crawford et al.'s (2020) study |
Written by Jade Smith
Rats don’t always get the best press. They’re often seen as unwanted pests that infest our streets and sewers. However, another point of view is that rats are intelligent and resourceful animals. In fact, some of the brain structures of rats resemble the more primitive elements of the human brain, which means that behavioural research on rats can actually help us model human behaviours. Though it may seem like a bit of a leap, psychology research has been using rodents for decades to model behaviour because their genetic, biological and behavioural characteristics resemble those of humans.
It is for this very reason that Crawford & colleagues (2020) wanted to study how differences in rats’ environment affected their competency in a driving task. Yes, you read that right. While not quite as flashy as Stuart Little’s red convertible, the rats were whizzing around on ‘Rodent-Operated Vehicles’ (ROV), which are ostensibly small food jars laid flat with wheels. By pressing down on metal bars and plates, the rats could drive their vehicle towards the desired destination of a tasty reward.
More to the point, the researchers weren’t simply studying whether rats could operate vehicles (it turns out that this is a given); the true aim of the study was to investigate the effect of the rats’ housing environment on their driving performance. Some rats were housed in enriched environments (‘enriched’ in this case meaning closer to a rat’s natural environment), while others were housed in boring laboratory cages. What the researchers found was that the rats living in enriched environments showed more robust learning, measured via driving performance, than their standard-housed counterparts.
These results are pretty cool. They suggest that rats exposed to rich and diverse environments that present an opportunity for more physical interactions demonstrate enhanced achievement of complex behaviours. Why does this matter? It essentially suggests that stimulating environments prompt greater learning, and if it is true for rats then it may well be true for us. However, this study is far from conclusive. With only 11 rodent participants, we can’t even be sure if this effect is consistent for rats, let alone be generalized to humans. Moreover, all the rats, regardless of their housing environment had to learn to operate their vehicles. It is possible that these rodent ‘driving lessons’ served as an enriched environment of sorts, making the causal relationship between housing environment and performance a little tenuous.
So, what should we take away from all this? Well, the study did show that rats living in an enriched environment were faster at learning and performed better in the driving task, and this isn’t inconsistent with previous research of this kind. So while driving may seem like an irrelevant task for rodent participants (although the use of an ROV could come in very handy if a rat wanted to escape a laboratory), Crawford & colleagues have added weight to the idea that our environment, whether that be home, work or school, can impact our performance on complex tasks. Excuse me now, while I decorate my room with plants and pictures.
References
Crawford, L. E.,
Knouse, L. E., Kent, M., Vavra, D., Harding, O., LeServe, D., ... &
Lambert, K. G. (2020). Enriched environment exposure accelerates rodent driving
skills. Behavioural Brain Research, 378, 112309.