Are mice clever enough to be strategic? A neuroscientist who studies learning in humans and animals, and who has long worked with mice, wondered why rodents often performed poorly in tests when they knew how to perform well. With a simple experiment, and by acting as 'a little bit of a mouse psychologist,' he and his team figured it out.
Are mice clever enough to be strategic? A neuroscientist who studies learning in humans and animals, and who has long worked with mice, wondered why rodents often performed poorly in tests when they knew how to perform well. With a simple experiment, and by acting as 'a little bit of a mouse psychologist,' he and his team figured it out.
To figure it out Kuchibhotla and Ziyi Zhu, a graduate student studying neuroscience, came up with a new experiment. "We find that when the animal is exploring, they engage in a really simple strategy, which is, 'I'm going to go left for a while, figure things out, and then I'm going to switch and go right for a while,'" Kuchibhotla said."Mice are more strategic than some might believe."
If the animal didn't have an internal model of the task, there would be no expectations to violate and the mice would keep performing poorly. During the experiments Kuchibhotla said he became"a little bit of a mouse psychologist" to interpret their behavior. Like working with a nonverbal infant, he and Zhu had to infer the underlying mental processes from the behavior alone.
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