Rats Better Than Humans

Rats are better than humans….. at least in some areas.

The British Psychological Society reports on an experiment showing that rats are better at a specific learning test because unlike humans rats are more able to follow a ‘implicit similarity approach’ i.e. going with gut instinct.

As the blog post explains:

The participants – 16 rats and 24 humans – were trained to recognise that certain patterns (stripes of light and dark, known as gratings) shown on a screen were the targets, while others were the distractors. The patterns were presented in pairs, and for the rats, if they followed the target pattern in a pair, this led them to the correct route (out of two) towards the safety of a platform in a water maze. For humans, choosing the target pattern simply led to presentation of a “correct” symbol – a green triangle pointing upwards; choosing the distractor pattern triggered a downward red triangle.

Through choosing the different patterns and receiving feedback, the rats and humans learned which patterns were targets and which were distractors. In one “rule based” version of the task, the targets and distractors always differed only along one dimension – either the frequency, or the orientation, of the light and dark stripes. In the other “information integration” version of the task, the targets differed from the distractors along both dimensions (frequency and orientation) simultaneously.

The key challenge occurred next, when the rats and humans entered the test phase, and attempted to generalise what they’d learned in the training phase to new pairs of patterns. The rats and humans performed similarly on the rule-based version of the task. However, when it came to the “information integration” version, the rats performed significantly better than the humans. This was because the humans’ performance dipped in the “integrated information” version of the task, whereas the rats performed just as well at this version as they did on the rule-based version.

This cruel experiment where rats were forced into a ‘water maze’ and only allowed to escape when they solved the puzzle demonstrates one thing – that humans are not superior to other animals. We are only superior if we choose to value the traits we have above the traits other animals have. We are certainly not morally superior as the people who conducted this test exemplify!

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