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Rats in Doom VR

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Re: Rats in Doom VR

#11

Post by revolvingocelot »

pzh wrote: post #3

They seem to all walk in a straight line. Are they not able to make turns? It’s hard to tell if they’re even perceiving the VR environment or just doing their own thing on the sphere.

I suspect that TFA's author is aware of this, but rats' vision is so poor that I'm not certain VR is the correct modality for them. IIRC they rely on smell, primarily, along with touch, to navigate their environment. I imagine that the rat just decided to accept the likely-ineffective vagaries of the experimental setup, because the smell of food was tantalizingly nearby.

Re: Rats in Doom VR

#13

Post by OneTimePetes »

revolvingocelot wrote: post #11
pzh wrote: post #3

They seem to all walk in a straight line. Are they not able to make turns? It’s hard to tell if they’re even perceiving the VR environment or just doing their own thing on the sphere.

I suspect that TFA's author is aware of this, but rats' vision is so poor that I'm not certain VR is the correct modality for them. IIRC they rely on smell, primarily, along with touch, to navigate their environment. I imagine that the rat just decided to accept the likely-ineffective vagaries of the experimental setup, because the smell of food was tantalizingly nearby.

Did not Feynman use rat experiments in his book to lay heavily into social studies? As i recall in the book, there was only one guy whose rat/mouse experiments had enough rigour, eliminating data disturbing experiment influences, systematically.

Re: Rats in Doom VR

#15

Post by lightbendover »

spants wrote: post #4

seems cruel to me.

You would really hate to see the mouse house and depending labs of any research hospital then. The mice here are living a life of luxury by comparison. Yeah, yeah, I know you or someone else will come out against those practices as well; I would love to hear ideas for a replacement or a proposal to just stop science and progress all together.

Re: Rats in Doom VR

#16

Post by __s »

OneTimePetes wrote: post #13
revolvingocelot wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that TFA's author is aware of this, but rats' vision is so poor that I'm not certain VR is the correct modality for them. IIRC they rely on smell, primarily, along with touch, to navigate their environment. I imagine that the rat just decided to accept the likely-ineffective vagaries of the experimental setup, because the smell of food was tantalizingly nearby.

Did not Feynman use rat experiments in his book to lay heavily into social studies? As i recall in the book, there was only one guy whose rat/mouse experiments had enough rigour, eliminating data disturbing experiment influences, systematically.

https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm search for "All experiments in psychology are not of this type"

A paper found that in order to prevent rats cheating the floor needed to have sand to prevent them picking up on vibrations. The result should've been that experiments began incorporating this measure in their own setups, but instead the paper went ignored

The paper: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1939-01955-001

Amusingly this VR direction could also be a useful method to limit the rat's perceptions to the experiment. But first it'd need to have the rat trained to explore a 3d environment & be fed by collecting food in the 3d environment

Re: Rats in Doom VR

#18

Post by mattkrause »

revolvingocelot wrote: post #11
pzh wrote: post #3

They seem to all walk in a straight line. Are they not able to make turns? It’s hard to tell if they’re even perceiving the VR environment or just doing their own thing on the sphere.

I suspect that TFA's author is aware of this, but rats' vision is so poor that I'm not certain VR is the correct modality for them. IIRC they rely on smell, primarily, along with touch, to navigate their environment. I imagine that the rat just decided to accept the likely-ineffective vagaries of the experimental setup, because the smell of food was tantalizingly nearby.

VR has become a pretty popular tool in neuroscience.

Rodents can be trained to follow cues shown in VR, or even navigate to specific virtual locations by running on the sphere, so they can certainly perceive something.

That said, vision is certainly not their primary sense and the organization of their visual system is...dissimilar from humans and other primates.

Re: Rats in Doom VR

#19

Post by mattkrause »

OneTimePetes wrote: post #13
revolvingocelot wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that TFA's author is aware of this, but rats' vision is so poor that I'm not certain VR is the correct modality for them. IIRC they rely on smell, primarily, along with touch, to navigate their environment. I imagine that the rat just decided to accept the likely-ineffective vagaries of the experimental setup, because the smell of food was tantalizingly nearby.

Did not Feynman use rat experiments in his book to lay heavily into social studies? As i recall in the book, there was only one guy whose rat/mouse experiments had enough rigour, eliminating data disturbing experiment influences, systematically.

The moral of that story, IMO, is not "don't do experiments with rodents" or even "bio/psych is nonsense."

Instead, the point is that a good scientist has to aggressively consider possible explanations for your data and possible experimental confounds. This is much, much harder when studying subjects that have some agency of their own, like rats or humans.

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