I am not a rat, zoologically speaking. But if I had nothing to do but get from point a to point b, day in, day out, I would prefer the mental stimulation of figuring something out, if it’s easy enough and I’m sure I’ll get to my goal each time.
I thought of it with my dog, who, like most of it’s kind, seem to like–perk up, want to do it again–a mental challenge.
I don’t suppose, or care, if a one knows about “like”; but lab-rat studies map behaviors all the time.
So, setting an experiment with the same amount of physical exertion–perhaps counting, I don’t know, the extra exertion in making turns versus making a bee line straight to food–would a rat prefer, given enough repetition, a slightly changing path every x times?
One of my ways of working my way thru college was being in charge of the experimental animals- beyond that which the maintenance dept would. Feeding them, etc. During holiday breaks, I would also run some few rats thru their maze and time them. They seemed to enjoy it.
Even when not hungry, they would still run the maze. However, I didnt like the “making them hungry” part which i sometimes had to do.
When an animal gets a reward it triggers a dopamine spike in the brain. However, if the reward is expected, the dopamine spike is displaced from the moment the reward is received to the moment the reward is anticipated. (This allows the brain to chain together sequences of actions.)
While it’s impossible to say conclusively what the experience of being a rat is like, if we assume that a rat experiences “pleasure” when it gets a reward we can also assume that the displacement of the dopamine value response causes similar feelings of “pleasure” when the rat does things that it has learned will lead to getting a reward.
The problem with this theory is that I’m assuming the rats had run the maze in the past and been rewarded with food. So you don’t know if they were running it for you out of just pleasure or in the expectation that there would be food at the end.
This is all correct, and fine logic, but it’s worth pointing out that dopamine is involved in many functions in the brain. So even if the rats are just wandering about, bored out of their gourd, they will be some release of dopamine, as it’s necessary for movement.
(This is just one of the reasons why those well-known facts of “eating chocolate is addictive – it’s just like taking cocaine!”, or whatever, are garbage).
But a suitably-design study controlling for this could well find that the rats actually find maze running rewarding.
Well, I’ve never experimented with rats, but have learned first hand that gerbils love running through mazes, exploring every corner, whether or not there’s any food or other reward waiting for them at the end.
So, if the question is, “Do you rodents have innate curiosity, and do they get any pleasurable mental stimulation from running through a maze,” I’m inclined to think the answer is yes."
I don’t know about mazes but even animals in the wild love running on running wheels so I wouldn’t find it surprising that maze running is intrinsically pleasurable.
Trained dolphins are well-known for continuing to work with their trainers even after a training session is over and they’ve eaten all the fish. In the scenario that I saw, it was unambiguously and deliberately made clear that the dolphins knew that the session was over. Once we started that protocol, both dolphins immediately adopted a trick of their own to keep the trainers working: Upon being given the very last fish, the dolphins would hand it back to the trainer. They did this repeatedly, until there was nothing left of the fish but a shredded pile of raw entrails.
One surprising result of that study is the difference between mice and rats. The data found that mice were over twenty times more likely to run on a wheel than rats were.