Abstract
Several studies have attempted to reveal the evolutionary mechanisms of physical causal understanding in non-human animals by investigating their tool-use behavior. Rats are one of the most commonly used species in experiments in many fields, including neuroscience and physiological psychology, but behavioral tasks for investigating the mechanisms in rodents have not yet been established. The present study implemented a novel training paradigm: a rake-shaped tool was presented in the experimental apparatus without a reward. If rats manipulated the rake laterally over specific distances, the experimenter retrieved the rake and offered the reward by hand. The rats never obtained food directly with the tool during training, and the tool never touched the reward. In the test, the rake was placed at the center of the apparatus, and the reward was placed on either the left or right side of the rake. The rats had no prior experience of obtaining the reward with the tool before the test, and they could not use this simple strategy to manipulate the rake in the direction of the reward during the test. One of eight rats could manipulate the rake according to the position of the reward. The present study offers a tool-use task to reveal the evolutionary mechanisms of physical causal understanding.
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Acknowledgements
This study is part of the unpublished doctoral thesis of the author at Doshisha University. The thesis was written under the direction of Dr. Kenjiro Aoyama.
Funding
The author was a research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI [grant numbers 17 J03299, 18H06484, and 19 K20652].
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All procedures and treatments were approved by the Doshisha University Animal Experiment Committee, and were conducted in accordance with the guidelines established by the Doshisha University Ethics Review Committee.
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Nagano, A. Behavioral task to assess physical causal understanding in rats (Rattus norvegicus). Curr Psychol 41, 8692–8704 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-01315-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-01315-w