tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6082884356298669583.post3060747482716517021..comments2023-08-29T09:04:50.934-07:00Comments on Psychology: Black Rats of IsraelRoyakarakianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03396119173356935690noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6082884356298669583.post-49541490403589896282012-10-31T07:36:01.589-07:002012-10-31T07:36:01.589-07:00Nice coverage of one of my favorite behavioral ana...Nice coverage of one of my favorite behavioral analyses of all time. A few comments.<br /><br />You write: "Pups of any species must look to the mother to learn how to feed and forage for food, otherwise they will die. It is this necessity and situation that causes the pups to socially learn the behavior from mothers,..."<br /><br />I don't think the authors conclude that the rat pups learned the proper stripping technique by watching the mothers strip the pine cone. Rather, they managed to occasionally steal the partially stripped pine cones from their mother, providing them with the necessary conditions for trial-and-error learning (i.e., instrumental learning) to allow them to learn the proper technique for stripping the pine cones efficiently.<br /><br />Also, I doubt any type of "Clever Hans" effects introduced by the experimenters could have biased the results toward the pattern they report having observed in their experiments. If so, we should have seen a lot more positive results as the "sigh" exhibited by the experimenters would presumably have been present in all of the experiments. Nevertheless, only a few of the experiments were successful (e.g., the cross-foster experiment), and then only for the group of rat pups raised with the experienced stripper mother, not with the naieve stripper mother. Thus, even in this experiment, rat pups in both groups should have been exposed to the "sighs" of the experimenter and thus have learned to strip the cones. Finally, rats have not been shown to be so highly influenced by subtle human-derived cues the way dogs and horses have been.Aaron Blaisdellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17204484453346358921noreply@blogger.com