I had the rats learn that a light, a little flashing light in a Pavlovian box, is followed sometimes by a tone and sometimes by food.
The information here is a little scant. If, in the cases where there was a tone instead of food, the tone always followed very soon after the light, it’d be most logical for rats to wait for the tone after seeing the light, and only go look for food after confirming that no tone was forthcoming. (This would save them effort assuming the food section was significantly far away. No tone = food. Tone = no food. Or did the scientists sometimes have the light be followed by both tone and food? I assume no, because that would introduce a first-order Pavlovian association between tone and food, which would mess up the next part of the experiment.)
Then, at test, some of the rats got tone and they tended to go look in the food section.
If, as I suggested above, the rats had previously been trained to wait for the lack of a tone before checking in the food section, this result would more strongly rule out a second-order Pavlovian response.
The critical test was with another group of rats that got the same training. We gave them a lever that they had never had before. They were in this box, and they have a lever that is rigged so that if they press the lever the tone will immediately come up. … In that case, the intervening rats, after hearing the tone of their own intervention, should not expect food. Indeed, they didn’t go to food nearly as much.
On the one hand, this is really surprising. On the other hand, I don’t see how rats could survive without some cause-and-effect and logical reasoning. I’m really eager to see more studies on logical reasoning in animals. Any anecdotal evidence with house pets anyone?
The information here is a little scant. If, in the cases where there was a tone instead of food, the tone always followed very soon after the light, it’d be most logical for rats to wait for the tone after seeing the light, and only go look for food after confirming that no tone was forthcoming. (This would save them effort assuming the food section was significantly far away. No tone = food. Tone = no food. Or did the scientists sometimes have the light be followed by both tone and food? I assume no, because that would introduce a first-order Pavlovian association between tone and food, which would mess up the next part of the experiment.)
If, as I suggested above, the rats had previously been trained to wait for the lack of a tone before checking in the food section, this result would more strongly rule out a second-order Pavlovian response.
On the one hand, this is really surprising. On the other hand, I don’t see how rats could survive without some cause-and-effect and logical reasoning. I’m really eager to see more studies on logical reasoning in animals. Any anecdotal evidence with house pets anyone?