{"id":2946,"date":"2025-01-09T05:54:35","date_gmt":"2025-01-09T05:54:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bullseye.ac\/blog\/?p=2946"},"modified":"2025-01-09T05:54:37","modified_gmt":"2025-01-09T05:54:37","slug":"the-playful-side-of-science-training-rats-for-fun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bullseye.ac\/blog\/book-reviews-summary\/the-playful-side-of-science-training-rats-for-fun\/","title":{"rendered":"The Playful Side of Science: Training Rats for Fun"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Number of words: 1,222<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Annika Reinhold says that she likes playing with animals (she has two cats) and \u201cdoing unconventional things that no one has done before.\u201d When the chance came up to teach rats to play hide-and-seek<\/a>, she was a natural candidate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One might question the wisdom of training<\/em> rats to hide, but there\u2019s a good reason to do so. In neuroscience, animal research is traditionally about control and conditioning\u2014training animals, in carefully regulated settings, to do specific tasks using food rewards. But those techniques aren\u2019t very useful for studying the neuroscience of play<\/a>, which is universal to humans, widespread among animals, and the antithesis of control and conditioning. Playing is about freedom and fun. How do you duplicate those qualities in a lab?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After watching YouTube videos of pets and their owners, Michael Brecht<\/a>, a neuroscientist at the Humboldt University of Berlin, came up with the idea of using hide-and-seek. Reinhold, a master\u2019s student in his lab, jumped at the chance. She knew that rats are social, intelligent, and playful, and will chase, roughhouse, and wrestle with one another, much like human children do. Perhaps they\u2019d play with her.<\/em> \u201cI was optimistic enough to try it,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She began by getting six adolescent rats accustomed to a 300-square-foot room fitted with boxes and barriers behind which they (or Reinhold) could hide. She also habituated the animals to her<\/em> by stroking them, chasing them with her hands, and tickling them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After one month, Reinhold taught them to seek. She placed them in an open box and walked to a different part of the room. If they approached her, she rewarded them with tickles. At first, she stood in the open, but once the rats got the hang of approaching her, she incrementally raised the difficulty by partially hiding, then hiding fully while the rodents were watching, and finally hiding while the box was closed. Similarly, to teach them to hide, she rewarded them for leaving their box, then for scurrying to another area, then for finding and staying in a hiding spot. Crucially, she never remunerated the rats with classic rewards such as water or food. She treated them only to tickles and social contact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All six rats learned to seek, and five also learned to hide. They clearly understood the rules of the game, and played strategically. When seeking, they searched systematically, beginning with past hiding locations. When hiding, they chose opaque boxes instead of transparent ones and kept quieter. They also seamlessly switched between the two roles, taking their cue from whether the starting box was closed (indicating \u201cseek\u201d) or open (indicating \u201chide\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rats learned the game in only a couple of weeks, which is \u201cimpressive in neuroscience,\u201d says Juan Ignacio Sanguinetti-Scheck, who also took part in the study. \u201cAnimals can take months to learn tasks, even monkeys, but we\u2019re generally trying to teach them to use joysticks or things they\u2019d never do in normal life.\u201d Hide-and-seek, by contrast, draws on behaviors such as concealing, finding peers, and switching roles, which aren\u2019t just natural parts of rat life, but also frequent parts of rat play. <\/em>In retrospect, it was the perfect game for uniting two different species. \u201cIt\u2019s a clever and innovative approach,\u201d says Gordon Burghardt of the University of Tennessee. \u201cMany animals play with other species and engage in peekaboo, tug of war, or tag, but this example does seem unexpectedly complex.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why did the rats play along? It\u2019s possible that they were going after tickles and other social rewards. After all, for two decades researchers have known that rats enjoy being tickled<\/a> and react by producing ultrasonic chirps<\/a> that can be compared to laughter. But Reinhold found that once discovered, the rats would often run away and re-hide, delaying their reward and prolonging the game itself. \u201cIt seemed really playful,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She and her colleagues believe that rather than pursuing rewards, the rats were playing for the sake of it. They played because they had fun. For a start, and this is an unusual but welcome line to see in a scientific paper, \u201cthe animals looked like they are having fun,\u201d the team writes. When they reunited with Reinhold, they frantically jumped on the spot\u2014a behavior delightfully known as freudensprung<\/em>, or \u201cjoy jumps.\u201d They also teased Reinhold by repeatedly getting close and running away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rats also behaved quite unlike rodents that take part in typical studies for typical rewards. When conditioned with food, rats are usually silent and can tirelessly perform hundreds of trials. Reinhold\u2019s rodents were eager to play, highly vocal, extremely active, and tuckered out when each block of games was over. \u201cIt\u2019s rare in neuroscience to see rats that are so engaged in a task,\u201d Sanguinetti-Scheck says. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen a rat run so much in a lab.\u201d It\u2019s both heartening and a little tragic to see what rats are really like when they\u2019re just allowed to be rats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For many people, the idea of rats playing for fun would be wholly unsurprising, but there\u2019s a long history of denying human emotions to animals for fear of anthropomorphism. Certainly, other species do <\/em>sometimes lack mental skills<\/a> that one would assume they had, and calling for objectivity is reasonable. But \u201cit\u2019s also important to not be completely obtuse and disregard the fact that we share a lot with animals,\u201d Sanguinetti-Scheck says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cJuvenile rats are one of the most playful mammals known,\u201d says Lynda Sharpe of the Australian National University. \u201cAlthough pet-rat owners won\u2019t be surprised by these findings, the study is valuable because it demonstrates the cognitive complexity of play in this species.\u201d Indeed, hide-and-seek might help tease out what mental feats rats are really capable of. In switching roles, for example, are they taking on the perspective of their human partners, showing what researchers call \u201ctheory of mind\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The team has started analyzing the rats\u2019 brains mid-game, by implanting wireless electrodes in their medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC)\u2014a brain region associated with decision making, social interactions, and (in humans, at least) theory of mind. The electrodes have revealed that individual neurons in a rat\u2019s mPFC will fire at very specific moments during a game. One neuron, for example, went off only when the rat was sealed inside the starting box at the beginning of seeking rounds. By looking at this cell\u2019s activity, Sanguinetti-Scheck could count how many rounds Reinhold had played with the animal, without having to watch them. \u201cThe rat has agency throughout the game, so some trials can be very fast and some can be very long,\u201d he says, \u201cbut regardless, [neurons in the mPFC] are responding to specific events.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not clear what that means, or what the region is specifically doing. But studies like this\u2014brain recordings from free-running rats playing a game they\u2019re actually engaged with\u2014might help provide answers. \u201cThe rats are doing incredible behaviors that involve many things that neuroscience is preoccupied with, like decision making,\u201d Sanguinetti-Scheck says. How does the animal decide where it wants to seek, or whether it wants to hide? Or what happens when it\u2019s surprised? When it thinks it knows where the experimenter is, what happens in its brain when she isn\u2019t there? \u201cThere are many things that we can now use hide-and-seek to start studying,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Excerpted  from <\/em>*This article appeared in Business Today on August 21, 2019.*<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Number of words: 1,222 Annika Reinhold says that she likes playing with animals (she has two cats) and \u201cdoing unconventional things that no one has done before.\u201d When the chance came up to teach rats to play hide-and-seek, she was a natural candidate. One might question the wisdom of training rats to hide, but there\u2019s a good reason … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Playful Side of Science: Training Rats for Fun - BullsEye<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/bullseye.ac\/blog\/book-reviews-summary\/the-playful-side-of-science-training-rats-for-fun\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Playful Side of Science: Training Rats for Fun - BullsEye\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Number of words: 1,222 Annika Reinhold says that she likes playing with animals (she has two cats) and \u201cdoing unconventional things that no one has done before.\u201d When the chance came up to teach rats to play hide-and-seek, she was a natural candidate. One might question the wisdom of training rats to hide, but there\u2019s a good reason ... 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