THIS ARTICLE IS HERE republished from Conversation under a Creative Commons License.
We built our first rodent car from a plastic cereal container. Through trial and error, my colleagues and I discovered that rats can learn to drive forward by grasping a tiny wire that acts like an accelerator pedal. Soon they were steering with surprising precision to reach the Froot Loop treat.
As expected, rats housed in enriched environments – equipped with toys, space and companions – learned to drive faster than those in standard cages. This finding supported the idea that Complex environments increase neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to change throughout life in response to environmental demands.
After publishing our research, the story of driving rats it went viral in the media. The project continues in my lab with up-to-date and improved rat-controlled remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs, designed by a robotics professor John McManus and his disciples. These upgraded electric ROVs—featuring rat-resistant wiring, indestructible tires, and ergonomic drive levers—resemble a rodent version of Tesla’s Cybertruck.
As a neuroscientist who is in favor of keeping and testing laboratory animals in natural habitats, it was fun to see how far we had strayed from my laboratory practices on this project. Rats usually prefer dirt, sticks and stones to plastic objects. Now we made them drive cars.
But humans didn’t evolve to drive either. Although our historic ancestors did not have cars, they had flexible brains which enabled them to acquire up-to-date skills – fire, language, stone tools and agriculture. Some time after the invention of the wheel, people began to produce cars.
Although cars designed for rats are a far cry from those found in the wild, we believed that driving was an engaging way to study how rodents acquire up-to-date skills. Surprisingly, we found that the rats were intensely motivated to learn to drive, often jumping into the car and revving the “lever engine” before the vehicle hit the road. Why was that so?
A up-to-date goal for joy
Concepts from beginner’s psychology textbooks took on a up-to-date, practical dimension in our rodent management laboratory. Building on fundamental learning approaches such as operant conditioningthat reinforces targeted behavior through strategic incentives, we trained rats step-by-step through their driver education programs.
Initially, they learned basic movements such as getting into a car and pressing a lever. However, with practice, these straightforward actions evolved into more complicated behaviors, such as driving a car to a specific location.