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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

#81

Post by imoverclocked »

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…

The constant reward is a way to quickly condition a behavior. Random reward has a higher permanence… however, it’s clear that they weren’t doing it for the treats when they started ignoring the treats they received.

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

#82

Post by hn_acker »

omoikane wrote: post #80

Is it still called a "selfie" if the rats don't get to see the resulting pictures? The dictionaries I consulted define "selfie" as the photographic output, and not the act of taking pictures.[1][2] I don't see any display device in that setup, so it seems the rats are just pressing buttons for sugar, independent of any camera activity. [1] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/selfie_n [2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/di…

> In Lignier's box, when Arthur and Augustin pushed the lever, a camera would snap their picture and display it on a screen in front of them.

The rats do see the pictures.

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

#83

Post by fallinghawks »

The idea that the rats are taking photos of themselves for the (self-aware) pleasure is pretty silly. The rats could have been trained to do anything with this method. Moving from rewarding every time for the desired behavior to occasionally rewarding causes the animal to keep doing the behavior for the reward. And if you stop rewarding entirely, the behavior will continue for a while, and it'll eventually stop. But by then the artist has made their point and doesn't care.

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

#84

Post by woliveirajr »

fallinghawks wrote: post #83

The idea that the rats are taking photos of themselves for the (self-aware) pleasure is pretty silly. The rats could have been trained to do anything with this method. Moving from rewarding every time for the desired behavior to occasionally rewarding causes the animal to keep doing the behavior for the reward. And if you stop rewarding entirely, the behavior will continue for a while, and it'll eventually stop. But…

> (self-aware) pleasure

Made me think: when humans take photos on {plataform} to receive likes, doesn't it means that humans know to apreciate what comes after those likes? Money, sex, lots of "friends", relationships, oportunities... The pleasure doesn't come from the post itself, and every like isn't a simple like, it is a whole bunch of things that comes with "I like that from you"

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

#85

Post by lukan »

imoverclocked wrote: post #81
lukan wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The constant reward is a way to quickly condition a behavior. Random reward has a higher permanence… however, it’s clear that they weren’t doing it for the treats when they started ignoring the treats they received.

Yeah, after they were full, they were just after the conditioned kick. But where they ever looking at their picture, or even had the chance to do so? In my understanding no. So they never cared about the camera, or the picture.

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

#86

Post by [deleted] »

fallinghawks wrote: post #83

The idea that the rats are taking photos of themselves for the (self-aware) pleasure is pretty silly. The rats could have been trained to do anything with this method. Moving from rewarding every time for the desired behavior to occasionally rewarding causes the animal to keep doing the behavior for the reward. And if you stop rewarding entirely, the behavior will continue for a while, and it'll eventually stop. But…

[deleted]

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

#87

Post by swid »

somedude895 wrote: post #67
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…

What's really crazy to me is that when you watch any film in >24(30?) fps, it looks like trash. I suppose it's because we're used to higher fps being home video? I wonder if films will ever be accepted or made in higher fps. Maybe if VR films actually become a real thing.

Part of the issue with higher fps is that it should be balanced with a shorter frame exposure time, so motion blur matches the frame rate. The rule of thumb is shutter speed should be 2x the fps, so shoot at 30fps, you want the shutter around 1/60s, if you shoot at 60fps, you should use 1/120.

This means anything that adds or remove frames is going to quickly cause the motion to look unnatural or at least different from the original.

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

#88

Post by ryandrake »

devbent wrote: post #51
sixothree wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Something about a dog liking to watch someone whose last name is Barker makes this a great story!

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

#89

Post by ravenstine »

moolcool wrote: post #23
ravenstine wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even that is attributing too much. When you give animals food, they tend to do things to get that food, humans being no exception. If you plant a soft-serve machine in the middle of a city square, you can bet people will press the lever to receive free ice cream. Hell, just give out coupons for free anything and people will show up. In either case, if you take away the free thing, people will keep returning in hopes…

> not just because they've been conditioned but because they want more of the free thing That is what literally what "conditioned" means. You're belabouring a point that OP is already making, and then following that up by sneering at the "34th percentile". Maybe the real art is always in the comments section.

> You're belabouring a point that OP is already making

I don't believe I am. I'll try to clarify.

> That is what literally what "conditioned" means.

Yes and no. I'm suggesting that attributing the effect merely to "conditioning" is reductionist. There's some level of conditioning to all biological behavior, and repeating a behavior in response to a reward is not entirely irrational. In principle, it's very rational for rats to keep returning to perform an action they know through experience provided food at some point. The rats in this art project aren't necessarily as thoughtless as conveniently suggested by the conditioning explanation. There's plenty of evidence that rats have the ability to remember details about the past and plan for the future.

> and then following that up by sneering at the "34th percentile".

I didn't mean it that way, and in retrospect I admit shouldn't have said that. It was rude but that's truly not the attitude I had in mind. Apologies to whom I was replying to.

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

#90

Post by jacquesm »

wegfawefgawefg wrote: post #59
kryptiskt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Smaller systems tend to tick over faster. Compare a fly heart with the heart of a mammal and the heart of the child with the heart of an adult. Or an elephant... Neural pathways will be longer and so slower, they may have more synapses in them. Overall it would be highly surprising for a larger system to have a higher clockrate than a smaller one.
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