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I'd be more impressed if they hadn't trained the second rat beforehand. The second rat may be perceiving the stimulus as anything - a pressure in it's tail, wh
by jbattle 14y ago
I'd be more impressed if they hadn't trained the second rat beforehand. The second rat may be perceiving the stimulus as anything - a pressure in it's tail, who knows? The second rat is trained to press a button when it feels a pressure in it's tail.
I just don't see a clear path from this to true 'communication' - unless it takes a form like morse code that one (human) mind taps out and the other (human) mind consciously decodes. But I know nothing about this either ;)
- endianswap 14y agoThe decoder rat isn't just pressing a button, it's choosing the correct button of two choices, and they got that up to 70% accuracy. It doesn't really matter if it feels the pressure in its tail if it can distinguish between two different messages and choose the correct switch.
- md224 14y agoI agree that it doesn't really matter, but I think the concern is that a layperson will read this and assume that the rats are actually exchanging conceptual knowledge, which we can't really prove at this point.
- stcredzero 14y agoFor all we know, the 2nd rat just gets a bloated feeling when it's the 2nd button.
- jcarreiro 14y agoThe "decoder" rat was not trained beforehand, unless I am badly misreading the article. The training process that occurred used the real-time signal from the "encoder" rat's brain. It simply took some time for the "decoder" to learn how to process the signal sent by the other rat.
- aidos 14y agoI think he means trained as in, was taught that by pushing one of the levers it got food. As you say, there was additional training to then handle the encoding / decoding.