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Artist trained rats to take selfies to make a point about social media

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Re: Artist trained rats to take selfies to make a point about social media

#51

Post by devbent »

sixothree wrote: post #32
throw__away7391 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. Obviously this is not true. A ton of "science" taught to kids through seemingly legitimate channels is in fact just the off the cuff intuitions of some thoroughly average adult, and adults on average tend to be staggeringly uninformed on most topics. EDIT: And even more so for history.

It may have been true during the days of CRTs. I have had a lot of pets and don't remember any of them showing interest in the televisions whatsoever, other than a source of warmth. And that is definitely no longer true.

I had a dog growing up that insisted on watching The Price Is Right every weekday morning and she'd bark at you until you changed the channel. Then she'd push a stool in front of the TV, sit on it, and watch Bob Barker for an hour and when the show was over she'd get up and leave.

Re: Artist trained rats to take selfies to make a point about social media

#52

Post by mistrial9 »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #2

When I was.a kid, I "learned" from some authority (TV? book?) that cats and dogs could not recognize process two dimensional images, and that a TV was therefore just visual noise to them.

this brings up complicated questions about perception, and the way that thinking links to senses.

In other words, it is quite possible that dogs see (poorly, without red) very much what we see, but the cognitive ability and then the "thinking" that happens after that, is very different.

Re: Artist trained rats to take selfies to make a point about social media

#53

Post by marcosdumay »

stephen_g wrote: post #25
TacticalCoder wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a kid I was taught by every adult that "humans cannot discern more than 24 fps". Except that we could all immediately tell if a Commodore Amiga demo was running at 25fps or 50fps and groups that'd have the frame rate drop from 50 to 25fps on some frames were "lame". So I knew it was obviously false that humans couldn't discern when something was running at more than 24 fps. Same when little Windows 95 util…

The claim that nobody could discern more than 24 fps is an odd one (and not one I've ever heard), since it's been generally known that's not true even back before 24 fps was chosen as a standard. Originally some (including Edison) wanted to standardise on higher frame rates for better motion. 24fps was basically compromise to balance against the amount of film used, being fairly close to the minimum speed that was co…

Fake knowledge was the most common thing circulating among people back then.

People mostly couldn't verify anything.

Re: Artist trained rats to take selfies to make a point about social media

#54

Post by calamari4065 »

phkahler wrote: post #37
tokai wrote: post #11

The connection to selfies is really weak. Its just classical conditioning. The stimulus is the food not the selfie taking, and the continued pressing of the selfie button without food is conditioned response.

>> After the rats were trained to push the level for sugar, Lignier changed the experiment's parameters. Sometimes taking a picture would yield a piece of sugar, and sometimes would not. And this part is using an extinction schedule. When you provide a reward for a behavior consistently and then take away the reward (extinction), the behavior tends to stop immediately. By randomizing the reward and maybe gradually de…

Rats simply like playing games, I'm not surprised that they thought pressing the button is fun.

But really this is a variant of the mirror test. These rats were freshly adopted and have probably never seen a mirror, and have no idea what they look like. If they were given a mirror for a while before running this experiment, we might see different behavior.

I found a paper [0] suggesting that rats do recognize other rats in mirrors, still photos, and video, but the results aren't very strong. I think the theory is that their eyesight is pretty poor and they rely mostly on scent to identify other rats.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5849344/

Re: Artist trained rats to take selfies to make a point about social media

#55

Post by yareal »

lukan wrote: post #46
moolcool wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an artistic remix of the classic Skinner Box experiment. The creator is an artist, not a scientist, and his point is being artistically rather than scientifically. As a sidenote: Social media has been described as a skinner box a million times before, but expressing it literally like this is, IMO, clever, interesting, and also cute. The idea using scientific experiments as metaphor to make art is cool, and I hop…

I don't know, it seems a bit dishonest to imply that the rats wanted the selfies(I got that impression), when all they wanted was pressing the button, because they learned, it would produce treats reliable, and later at least sometimes. If at some point, there never would be treats coming anymore, that would uncondition themself and at some further point, they would not care about that stupid button anymore. Unless o…

Did it make you feel something to see this article? Frustration, interest, excitement, anything?

It's art. How you interpret it is sort of the point. It's not science, it's someone trying to make you think, and it seems like you thought in response to it. Successful art then.

Re: Artist trained rats to take selfies to make a point about social media

#56

Post by yareal »

HenryBemis wrote: post #35
moolcool wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that in the event of an apocalypse these people will be my competitors for resources and then I feel joy in my soul I read this in Dwight Shrute's voice

Hahahaha perhaps it's from exactly that.. I did finish watching 5 episodes of the US The office a few mins before I wrote this!! GREAT catch!!

[dead]

Re: Artist trained rats to take selfies to make a point about social media

#57

Post by timeon »

tokai wrote: post #11

The connection to selfies is really weak. Its just classical conditioning. The stimulus is the food not the selfie taking, and the continued pressing of the selfie button without food is conditioned response.

Maybe they continue with pressing the button because if it brings them food maybe it will also free them from Skinner box.

Re: Artist trained rats to take selfies to make a point about social media

#58

Post by wegfawefgawefg »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #12
Jeff_Brown wrote: post #2

When I was.a kid, I "learned" from some authority (TV? book?) that cats and dogs could not recognize process two dimensional images, and that a TV was therefore just visual noise to them.

When I was a kid I was taught by every adult that "humans cannot discern more than 24 fps". Except that we could all immediately tell if a Commodore Amiga demo was running at 25fps or 50fps and groups that'd have the frame rate drop from 50 to 25fps on some frames were "lame". So I knew it was obviously false that humans couldn't discern when something was running at more than 24 fps. Same when little Windows 95 util…

i can feel 144-200hz. above that i cant tell anymore, but probably pixel response times arent good enough yet on consumer hardware to provide a real test to me. 60hz feels awful to me. side note, i can discern stutters at 144hz + when i take a deep breathe.

Re: Artist trained rats to take selfies to make a point about social media

#59

Post by wegfawefgawefg »

kryptiskt wrote: post #14
Jeff_Brown wrote: post #2

When I was.a kid, I "learned" from some authority (TV? book?) that cats and dogs could not recognize process two dimensional images, and that a TV was therefore just visual noise to them.

Cats and dogs need higher refresh rates to see TV as a movie rather than a slideshow of images: https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/8921/why-can-cat...

Very interesting. Its like smaller brains have a higher clock speed. global oscillations?
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