David’s Rat Research
When I refer to my graduate student
days, I usually mention that I ran rats as a hobby. (My dissertation research
was on suicidal behavior.) The psychology department bought me my first few batches
of rats and paid for the shavings and food. Thereafter, I bred them myself. One
year, we lived in an apartment with no one else in the building, and so I
brought the rats home and kept them in a spare bedroom.
Lester, D. (1967). Exploratory
behavior of dominant and submissive rats. Psychonomic Science, 9,
285-286.
Lester, D. (1968). Effects of habituation to fear on the exploratory behavior of rats. Nature, 220, 932.
I never really liked Skinner’s theory of learning. Of course, the theory explains simple behaviors but, as I used to tell my students, it didn’t even fully explain the interesting behavior in rats! In fact, talking with Abraham Maslow (I was his teaching assistant) led me to my research on whether there were self-actualized rats, that is, rats who were good at everything – better explorers, better learners, etc.
I remember in particular two of my rats. I was teaching them to turn left in a T-shaped maze for a food reward with four trials each day. They all learned this task. But one rat, on the first trial each day, would turn right but keep his back paws outside of the turn (so that I could not drop a guillotine door behind him because he did not meet my criterion of all four paws in the corridor). He would sniff the air, decide that there was no food there, back up carefully and then enter the left corridor. On the next three trials that day, he turned left, left and left. He did that every day. He was checking whether that I had switched the food on him.
The other rat used speed. On the first trial of the day, he would zip into the right corridor and zip out, evading the descending door. Then he would go left for the rest of the day. I never was quick enough to catch him in the right-hand corridor.
They never were rewarded for this behavior, but they persisted in checking on me. In later research, I found and reported in a published article that the quickest learners were also the best explorers. I meant to go on and see if they excelled at other tasks, but a job offer from Gene Brockopp to work at the suicide prevention center in Buffalo ended my rat research.
There are other interesting aspects to the research. The maze I used was about three feet up from the floor and, occasionally, rats would back up in fear and fall off the equipment. I discarded their data because this might have changed their anxiety level which I was manipulating. I always reported in my published reports that x rats fell off the equipment, and their data were discarded. I never found any other researcher on exploratory behavior in rats reporting that their rats fell of the equipment. I’m sure that their rats fell too, but the researchers never bothered to report this.
I also replicated a study by another research on exploratory behavior in blinded rats. (They were white rats.) Blinding my rats was so traumatic for me that I decided to never do any physiological research on rats again. None of my fellow graduate students went to see my blinded rats, and I concluded that, rather than enucleation being symbolic of castration (a Freudian hypothesis), castration was symbolic of enucleation and, therefore, more anxiety arousing! By the way, the research showed that blinding had no impact on the rats’ exploratory behavior – because they do not use vision but rather their whiskers and sense of smell.
Lester, D. (1967). Exploratory
behavior in peripherally blinded rats. Psychonomic Science, 8, 7-8.
