The girls can’t hide their excitement as they are brought into the racing arena.
“Black Tail” is up first and takes a few seconds to sniff out her surroundings before putting her paw on a lever and dashing away.
After charging to the finish line, she devours a well-deserved Froot Loop hanging from a “treat tree.”
Black Tail is one of the University of Richmond’s rat drivers – a group that first dazzled the world in 2019 with their ability to drive tiny cars.
Now the rodents serve as ambassadors for the school’s Behavioral Neuroscience Laboratory, which is headed by Professor Kelly Lambert.
“It gets people’s attention how smart and trainable these animals are,” explained Lambert, who has to balance her affection for the furry speedsters with the need for scientific detachment — and just names them after the Sharpie colors that their tails have to mark.
The idea of racing rodents started as a playful challenge from a colleague.
But far from being a novelty, the animals are part of a groundbreaking project studying how environmental enrichment shapes the brain – which in turn could hold potential for solving human mental health challenges.
For Lambert, one of modern medicine’s greatest failings was its inability to cure mental illness with drugs, despite the huge profits made by drug companies.
These pharmaceutical approaches have come under increasing scrutiny since a landmark study published in July challenged the theory that chemical imbalances, particularly a lack of serotonin, cause depression.
– fruits of their labor –
Instead, Lambert sees behavioral therapy as the key to treating the mind, and this is where the study of conspecifics comes in.
“Our brains change from the womb to the grave,” she said. “If we’re living engaged lives, that’s probably important and related to depression.”
A previous experiment of hers had divided rats into groups of “workers” who were assigned an effort-based reward task of digging through mounds of earth for a froot loop — or a control group of “trust fund” rats that were simply given treats.
When faced with stressful tasks, the worker rats held out longer than those conditioned to remain in a state psychologists call “learned helplessness.”
And when tasked with swimming, the worker rats displayed greater emotional resilience, as shown by a higher ratio of the hormone dehydroepiandrosterone to cortisol in their feces.
Rats that learned to drive also had biomarkers for greater resilience and less stress — which Lambert suggests may be related to the satisfaction of acquiring a new skill, like a human mastering a new piano piece.
“They build paths that they take over and over again in the wild, and we wanted to see if they could continue to have these great navigational abilities in a vehicle,” explained research lab specialist Olivia Harding.
The training wasn’t easy: the team first tried getting the rats to nudge the driving controls with their snouts before realizing that the animals preferred to stand on their hind legs and use their front paws.
In early car models, the rats had to touch wires attached to the front, left, or right of the car to complete a weak circuit corresponding to the direction of movement.
Now, however, they move on fancier rides with levers designed by a roboticist.
Even when their cars were parked in an unfamiliar location and pointed away from the treat, the rats learned to turn their vehicles and navigate for the reward, indicating advanced cognitive processing at work.
Today’s driving ladies, Black Tail and Multicolour Tail, show clear signs of “anticipatory” behavior when people enter the room, pace and attempt to scale their walls.
However, not all rats, like humans, have similar interests: while some individuals seemed eager to drive just for fun, others only did so for treats, while still others could not be persuaded to participate at all.
– Into the wild –
Female rats, in particular, have long been ignored by science because previous generations of researchers thought their four-day estrus cycles clouded the research.
This deprived scientists of potentially female-specific insights, a trend Lambert was keen to reverse in her experiments — and is now also a required condition for federal grants.
Lambert realized early in her career that studying rats living in cages without obstacle courses and “unenriched” activities was of limited use, much like studying humans in solitary confinement.
In their driving study, rats raised in enriched cages performed far better on driving tasks.
Her recent work has focused on differences between lab rats and those caught in the wild – finding that the latter had larger brains, more brain cells, a larger spleen to fight disease and much higher stress levels than their cousins in prison.
“It kind of blows my mind,” she said, that there has been so little interest in understanding these differences given their potential implications for human medicine.
It also raises an intriguing philosophical question: Are we more like the caged lab rats, the enriched lab rats, or the wild rats?
“I feel a little closer to the cared for lab rat than to the wild rat,” Lambert muses.
But the wild rats that have to forage for food and avoid predators every day of their lives — much like our own ancestors — could teach us about mental resilience.
#rodent #drivers #teach #mental #health
