NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread: April 2010 - Less Wrong

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Comment author: NancyLebovitz 06 April 2010 02:48:05PM *  3 points [-]

Rats have some ability to distinguish between correlation and cauation

To get back to the rat study—it's very simple actually. What I did is: I had the rats learn that a light, a little flashing light in a Pavlovian box, is followed sometimes by a tone and sometimes by food. So they might have used Pavlovian conditioning; just as I said, Pavlovian conditioning might be the substrate by which animals learn to piece together spatial maps and maybe causal maps as well. If they treat the light as a common cause of the tone and of food, they see [hear] the tone and they predict food might happen. Just like if you see the barometer drop then you think, "Oh, the storm might happen." But, if you see someone tamper with the barometer and you know that the barometer and the storm aren't causally related, then you won't think that the weather is going to change. So, the question is, if the rat intervenes to make the tone happen, will it now no longer think the food will occur.

So there were a bunch of rats; they all had the same training—light as an antecedent to tone and food. Then, at test, some of the rats got tone and they tended to go look in the food section. So they were expecting food based on the tone—which humans would says is a diagnostic reasoning process. “Tone is there because light causes tone and light also causes food. Oh, there must be food.” Or, it's just second order Pavlovian conditioning. The critical test was with another group of rats that got the same training. We gave them a lever that they had never had before. They were in this box, and they have a lever that is rigged so that if they press the lever the tone will immediately come up. So now the question is, do the rats attribute that tone to being caused by themselves. That is, did they intervene to make that variable change? If they thought that they were the cause of the tone, that means it couldn't have been the light, therefore the other effects of the light, food, would not have been expected. In that case, the intervening rats, after hearing the tone of their own intervention, should not expect food. Indeed, they didn't go to food nearly as much. That is the essence of the finding and how it fits in with this idea of causal models and how we go about testing our world.

the abstract

Comment author: Amanojack 06 April 2010 04:12:15PM 0 points [-]

I had the rats learn that a light, a little flashing light in a Pavlovian box, is followed sometimes by a tone and sometimes by food.

The information here is a little scant. If, in the cases where there was a tone instead of food, the tone always followed very soon after the light, it'd be most logical for rats to wait for the tone after seeing the light, and only go look for food after confirming that no tone was forthcoming. (This would save them effort assuming the food section was significantly far away. No tone = food. Tone = no food. Or did the scientists sometimes have the light be followed by both tone and food? I assume no, because that would introduce a first-order Pavlovian association between tone and food, which would mess up the next part of the experiment.)

Then, at test, some of the rats got tone and they tended to go look in the food section.

If, as I suggested above, the rats had previously been trained to wait for the lack of a tone before checking in the food section, this result would more strongly rule out a second-order Pavlovian response.

The critical test was with another group of rats that got the same training. We gave them a lever that they had never had before. They were in this box, and they have a lever that is rigged so that if they press the lever the tone will immediately come up. ... In that case, the intervening rats, after hearing the tone of their own intervention, should not expect food. Indeed, they didn't go to food nearly as much.

On the one hand, this is really surprising. On the other hand, I don't see how rats could survive without some cause-and-effect and logical reasoning. I'm really eager to see more studies on logical reasoning in animals. Any anecdotal evidence with house pets anyone?

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