Rats Taught To Drive!!

Rats!

As if traffic wasn’t bad enough!

In their wisdom, researchers at the University of Virginia have been teaching rats to drive. They’ve got these groovy little cars formed from clear plastic food containers, wheels added. The rats are trained to enter the car — a sort of tube — and steer it by pressing a lever to go right, left or straight ahead.

They’ve got a ‘playground’ of some 4 sq. m (43 sq. ft) to maneuver around, NewScientist.com reports. When they touch the steering bar and grab the lever with their paws, an electrical circuit is closed, causing the ‘car’ to move. As they accomplish that task, the rats are rewarded with pieces of Froot Loop cereal.

Amazing Accomplishments

So far, six females and eleven males have been trained to drive, propelling their ‘cars’ through mazes — for cereal pieces left further and further from the starting point. The mazes can force the drivers to use increasingly more complex maneuvers to reach the rewards.

And cereal isn’t their only reward: The driving exercise seems to lower the rats’ stress level. Scientists are able to track stress through measurements of the stress hormone corticosterone, as well as dehydroepiandrosterone, an anti-stress hormone. That testing is done via the rats’ feces, collected before and after the driving experiments.

And what, you may wonder, is the point of what has no doubt been a significant expenditure of time and research money?

Tasks Relax The Rodents

In part, says Dr. Kelly Lambert, the lead researcher, the aim was to see if rodents could be taught to perform more difficult tasks than some already mastered — such as recognizing objects, pressing bars, finding their ways through mazes, and digging up pieces of food.

Earlier studies have shown that performing such tasks seems to relax rodents, giving them a feeling similar to what humans feel when they learn a new task.

The ability of rats to drive these cars demonstrates the “neuroplasticity” of their brains, says Lambert. This refers to their ability to respond flexibly to novel challenges.

“I do believe that rats are smarter than most people perceive them to be, and that most animals are smarter in unique ways than we think,” she says.
And knowing that is useful because…?

Lambert imagines the knowledge being gained can be used to study how, for example, Parkinson’s Disease affects motor skills, and to develop non-pharmaceutical forms of treatment for mental illness.

The team is now planning follow-up experiments to understand how rats learn to drive, why it seems to reduce stress and which brain parts are involved.