Posted: Mar 26, 2011 3:08 am
DanDare wrote:So what would be some better experiments to isolate the serotonin as a cause?
It's hard to say at this point since the research is fairly fresh - we'd need to look at replicating it and expanding on it to get a better idea of what's going on. But to isolate serotonin as a cause it would help to run some behavioral experiments to see how these serotonin-altered mice respond to various other tasks.
For example, we could suppose that serotonin did not make the males more attractive, or even increase their sexual arousal, and instead it simply affected their ability to discriminate between males and females. To test this we could run a basic discrimination task to see if this more global process is what is being affected, and thus what is causing the change in sexual preference.
It's also possible that there isn't actually a change in sexual preference, but instead an effect on something like self-control; as such, we could then test them to see if their discounting functions are any different from a normal population of controls. If they are different, then it's much harder for us to conclude that serotonin is the cause since an organism's inability to control its sexual arousal will obviously result in some "homosexual" acts (especially when the organism shows some preference for males in standard conditions anyway).