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>> After the rats were trained to push the level for sugar, Lignier changed the experiment's parameters. Sometimes taking a picture would yield a piece of sugar

>> After the rats were trained to push the level for sugar, Lignier changed the experiment's parameters. Sometimes taking a picture would yield a piece of sugar, and sometimes would not. And this part is using an extinction schedule. When you provide a reward for a behavior consistently and then take away the reward (extinction), the behavior tends to stop immediately. By randomizing the reward and maybe gradually decreasing the frequency you have a much better chance that the behavior will persist without the reward. Because he did this we can't really be sure the selfies are their own reward, since the rats may have been simply trained to push a button.

calamari4065 3y ago
Rats simply like playing games, I'm not surprised that they thought pressing the button is fun. But really this is a variant of the mirror test. These rats were freshly adopted and have probably never seen a mirror, and have no idea what they look like. If they were given a mirror for a while before running this experiment, we might see different behavior. I found a paper [0] suggesting that rats do recognize other rats in mirrors, still photos, and video, but the results aren't very strong. I think the theory is that their eyesight is pretty poor and they rely mostly on scent to identify other rats. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5849344/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5849344/