Flexible Minds, from Play in Rats to Wild Cognition

With the internet, society has been exposed to puzzling and exquisite animal behavior, while neuroscience has vastly concentrated on a few inbred animal models studied in trained unnatural settings. Changing this trend is imperative. The onset of wireless recording technologies has allowed the development of more naturalistic inquiries into the brain and behavior of animals. By developing a novel behavioral paradigm in neuroscience, playing ‘Hide and Seek’ with rats, we were able to study mammalian play and its neural bases. We played ‘Hide and Seek’ with rats in a 30 square meter room, and found that they acquired the game easily and played by the rules. Rats played strategically and, without being conditioned, developed remarkable game specific vocalizations patterns. The freedom afforded to our subject animals allowed us to probe new forms of linking neural and behavioral phenomena. We reversed the arrow of inquiry by doing unsupervised clustering of neural population data allowing us to blindly refer back to the behavior of the rat during the game and uncover neural-behavioral associations unsuspected by the experimenters. My work in large scale wireless rat play laid the foundation for taking novel neurotechnologies out of the lab to study the brains and behavior of animals in the wild.

Learning Objectives: 

1. Review play in rats and its capabilities for enhancing animal welfare.

2. Explain the reverse physiology approach and wireless technologies.

3. Summarize Hidden Markov Models.