Abstract

Whereas human pro-social behavior is often driven by empathic concern for another, it is unclear whether nonprimate mammals experience a similar motivational state. To test for empathically motivated pro-social behavior in rodents, we placed a free rat in an arena with a cagemate trapped in a restrainer. After several sessions, the free rat learned to intentionally and quickly open the restrainer and free the cagemate. Rats did not open empty or object-containing restrainers. They freed cagemates even when social contact was prevented. When liberating a cagemate was pitted against chocolate contained within a second restrainer, rats opened both restrainers and typically shared the chocolate. Thus, rats behave pro-socially in response to a conspecific’s distress, providing strong evidence for biological roots of empathically motivated helping behavior.

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6061/1427

Here is what PopSci wrote

Given a choice between eating chocolate alone and rescuing their pals, rats will apparently save their pals and then share the chocolate with them. Trapping a rat in a cage sparks its cagemate into action, as it figures out how to open the cage and liberate its jailed friend. This is an unusual example of rats expressing empathy, a trait thought to be reserved to us higher mammals, the primates. Continued...

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2 ... te-mammals

Rats aren't too terribly social in thewild. Most mammals recognize parents and offspring, often by smell. Therefore you do not have to see or hear the other rat.

David Attenborough narrated some film of capuchin monkeys that showed empathy and cooperation.
It is hardly a feature only of humans or higher primates.

!	GENERAL MODNOTE Duplicate thread merged - Mr.Samsa

Rats display human-like empathy and will unselfishly go to the aid of a distressed fellow rodent, research has shown.
The results of an experiment in which rats opened a door to free trapped cage-mates astonished scientists.
No reward was needed and not even the lure of chocolate distracted the rescuing rats.
"This is the first evidence of helping behaviour triggered by empathy in rats," said US study leader Professor Jean Decety.
"There are a lot of ideas in the literature showing that empathy is not unique to humans, and it has been well demonstrated in apes, but in rodents it was not very clear.
"We put together in one series of experiments evidence of helping behaviour based on empathy in rodents, and that's really the first time it's been seen."

From here.

Gallstones wrote:David Attenborough narrated some film of capuchin monkeys that showed empathy and cooperation.
It is hardly a feature only of humans or higher primates.

I think the point is to demonstrate that certain features such as empathy are far more common and far more widespread than previously shown. It has the interesting side-effect of attacking the (partially) religious assertion of human specialness.

Some problems I think the researchers should have tried to fix:

1) As noted by the researchers:

Rats may have acted to stop the alarm calls of the trapped rats (18). Yet alarm calls occurred too infrequently to support this explanation.

Their claim that it happened too infrequently is pure speculation. We don't know what frequency of alarm calls are necessary to become aversive to a rat, and we know that there were significantly more alarm calls emitted in the trapped condition compared to any others, so it is a possible confound to the study. In other words, the rat's behavior may have been reinforced by the opening of the door stopping the alarm calls. The distress experienced by the trapped rat may have been irrelevant.

This is perhaps unlikely, but still something that needs to be accounted for.

2) They should have used a forced-choice setup when pitting the trapped conspecific against chocolate so that they could only have one or the other. Since the rats chose indiscriminately between chocolate and the trapped rat when they knew that they could free both, it doesn't really tell us anything.

3) Perhaps the most problematic part is that when they attempted to test whether the opening the door behavior was caused by access to play and social activities, they began both conditions with the "trapped" condition. That is, they trained the association between opening the door and having social activity with another rat before beginning their conditions. This means that the behavior is being reinforced by something other than relieving the distress of the other rat, meaning it is not an empathetic or altruistic act. This is evidenced by the fact that the latency to opening the door of an empty container following the trapped condition was not statistically different from the latency to opening the door of a container with a trapped rat inside for the first few days. The differences only appeared after repeated exposure to the condition - meaning that opening the empty container repeatedly extinguished the behavior in the first condition, and opening the separated cagemate was partially reinforced due to the similarities to the "trapped" condition. It's important to note that the latency to opening the container is greater in the separated condition than it is in the "trapped" condition (where they have access to social activities), meaning that there is a difference in the factors controlling the behavior.

They would have been better off training the rats how to open the door use a standard shaping procedure, where they are rewarded for food, and then extinguished the behavior for the few sessions prior to the beginning of the experimental conditions. This means that the rats would now have the skills required to open the door, but there would be no carryover effects from the prior training. The researchers would have also been better off using a single-subject design and counterbalancing the conditions that way so we could see the individual differences, rather than using between-group statistics.

harbely wrote:What are some careers in biology with little or no lab work? I am trying to figure out what I want to do with my life, and I am interested in going into biology. I found that I really liked the units on respiratory, circulatory and digestive systems, but I wasn't as interested in the other subjects - diversity, genetics, or evolution. As well, I would prefer a job that is less repetitive and more hands-on.

Dunno, try starting a thread about it.