This could be a function of the fact that I have very little training in statistics and am trying to get by on common sense and raw intelligence, but it seems to me that ‘enough rats’ implies, among other things, enough rats to see a ‘fairly’ (or ‘statistically’) consistent amount of time spent investigating new objects if the first part of the hypothesis as I stated it is true. If how much time the rats spend investigating new objects is affected by how recently they investigated a different new object, or some other variable that would affect all the rats on a given trial, rather than being consistent, or random, or affected by something that would affect some random subset of rats independently of a given trial, then I don’t see how adding more rats will help—you’d just get a clearer picture of the fact that the time spent investigating new objects varies based on some unconsidered variable that your test is allowing to affect the situation, which you’d then need to find and control for.
That’s a good point. If baseline rat curiosity can suddenly drop by half, then the baseline differential between time spent exploring new and old objects could also suddenly change.
This could be a function of the fact that I have very little training in statistics and am trying to get by on common sense and raw intelligence, but it seems to me that ‘enough rats’ implies, among other things, enough rats to see a ‘fairly’ (or ‘statistically’) consistent amount of time spent investigating new objects if the first part of the hypothesis as I stated it is true. If how much time the rats spend investigating new objects is affected by how recently they investigated a different new object, or some other variable that would affect all the rats on a given trial, rather than being consistent, or random, or affected by something that would affect some random subset of rats independently of a given trial, then I don’t see how adding more rats will help—you’d just get a clearer picture of the fact that the time spent investigating new objects varies based on some unconsidered variable that your test is allowing to affect the situation, which you’d then need to find and control for.
That’s a good point. If baseline rat curiosity can suddenly drop by half, then the baseline differential between time spent exploring new and old objects could also suddenly change.