Are You Smarter Than a Mouse?


"Are you smarter than a mouse?" This was one of the intriguing topics presented at this week's Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego, on research done by J.F. Gysner, M. Manglani, N. Escalona, R. Hamilton, M. Taylor, J. Paffman, E. Johnson, and L.A. Gabel, all based out of Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.

If you are a lab mouse, then you are undoubtedly familiar with mazes. Specifically, you’ve probably logged some time in a Hebb-Williams maze. For decades, it’s been the go-to research model: a spacial-visual maze that centers on twelve standard problems, which differ based on the learning/memory task researchers have assigned to you and your rodent buddies.

But the Hebb-Williams maze is not solely reserved for our tiny rodent friends. Its friendly confines have also been used to test the mettle of ‘rats, cats, rabbits, ferrets, mice, and monkeys.’

The Lafayette College team had a few questions on their minds. Would it alter test results to use a virtual model instead? And if not, could they run humans through the simulation and compare their performances against mice?

Clearly, a virtual maze is far more desirable in terms of space and construction costs. Also, it’s not nearly as problematic as shrinking humans down to fit into a mouse maze. (Which, for one thing, opens itself up to all manner of tired movie plots.)

Ninety-eight humans, both male and female, participated in the experiment. The study focused on two age groups: children aged 8-12, and young adults aged 18-21. The participants were screened and evaluated on their video game knowledge to eliminate any pre-trial skill biases.

In order to ensure that chocolate pellets would be enough of an incentive to run the maze, researchers skimped on the food until the mice reached 85% body weight. (Apparently the humans needed no coercion to run the virtual maze for chocolate pellets.)

Ultimately, when it came to the final showdown, humans from both age groups were faster and less prone to mistakes than their small furry counterparts. However, taking controls for species into account, the humans and mice performed “similarly”, suggesting their performance could be compared in future experiments.

Additionally, it turns out that using a computer-generated maze on humans did not alter their results. This was particularly good news for the Lafayette researchers, but perhaps not such a boon for the would-be producers of Honey I Shrunk the Kids 3.

So lucky for your self-esteem, it turns out you are smarter than a mouse, at least where maze-running is concerned. That is, until the playing field is leveled and then, well, say hello to your new competitors, the irrepressible Mickey and Minnie.

Check out Robb’s new book and more 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Robert Frost Quandary, or How Irrational Thinking Might Save Your Life

Image
You stumble out of the wilderness, having had no contact with humans for at least ten days. You’re weak from hunger and fatigue and you find yourself at a crossroads, power lines stretching out along each of the separate roadways. It’s decision time. You think about Robert Frost’s poem, and wonder if his advice to take the road less traveled might not just lead to your demise. What do you do, or more importantly, which brain system should you use to make this crucial decision? Daniel Kahneman, famed psychologist, winner of the Nobel prize for prospect theory and author of Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow might be the one guy to call, assuming your existential crossroads gets cellphone reception. Kahneman explains that we have two systems for making decisions. He refers to them simply as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is reflexive, automatic, and impulsive. It takes a constant reading of your surroundings and generates short-term predictions, all operating on a level beneath yo
Read more

Who Are You: Does Personality Change as We Age?

Image
Are you the same “you” that you were twenty years ago? Thirty? Forty? What about fifty years ago? While science still struggles to quantify, measure, and categorize personality, some have a different question: how stable is personality in the first place? Do the high school version of yourself and the retiree version of yourself still have some common immutable core? It depends how you look at it , says a paper by lead author Rodica Damian of University of Houston and her co-authors Marion Spengler of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, Brent W. Roberts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UH grad student Andreea Sutu. The paper in question goes by the catchy title “Sixteen going on sixty-six: A longitudinal study of personality stability and change across 50 years.” Damian and her colleagues compared the results for 1,795 U.S. adults who had taken a personality test as teenagers and then again, five decades years later. The team found that yes, there is a
Read more

The Best Painkiller Isn't What You Think It Is

Image
When we say that listening to the right song makes us feel better, usually we mean it in terms of emotions. However, a new study from the University of Utah Health suggests that combining certain painkillers with certain music boosts the pain-fighting effect of the medication a measurable amount. This recent bit of research was conducted specifically on models recreating two types of pain: inflammatory and post-surgical. (Nerve pain, or neuropathic pain, was not addressed.) Low doses of four medications were explored: ibuprofen, cannabidiol, levetiracetam, and NAX 5055. As for music, the researchers went with one artist only, while the control groups were given one of the four drugs and subjected to white noise. What music would you choose for optimal painkilling effect? The experimenters went with Mozart. (Interestingly, the phrase “Mozart therapy” already exists, referring to the beneficial effect ol’ Amadeus can have on patients with epilepsy. For instance, a 2018 st
Read more