"Just like us humans, learning to drive and navigate seemed to have a relaxing effect on the rats. In a control experiment, they found rats had higher levels of cortisol when being driven around in remote-controlled cars than when they were allowed to steer themselves."
Seems like a terrible control imo for me to say driving intrinsically has a relaxing effect. A better control would be rats doing nothing vs rats driving and seeing if the rats doing nothing were more stressed than the driving rats, meaning the driving rats were actually lowering their baseline stress.
In this experiment the control of being a passenger in a terrifying vehicle moving all by itself with no autonomy or control over the situation can quite likely be the thing causing elevated stress, rather than rats driving depressing levels of stress. Imagine if someone suddenly strapped you into a bubble that started moving by itself and you have no idea why this is happening, no control over the situation, or where you're going or what's going to happen to you. Stressful af. Hell, people get stressed just being in the passenger seat watching someone else drive.
The vast majority of people prefer having autonomy and control over their own motion vs being helplessly navigated by someone else you don't know/trust with zero context and no idea what's going on. A little misleading if this reflects the actual study.
Two dogs in separate rooms with floors that can give them a mild shock. Arranged so they get exactly the same shock. One dog can turn off the shock by performing an action; the other has no control.
This experiment turns the second dog into a shivering nervous wreck... but the first is fine. Same shocks; only difference was control.
>A better control would be rats doing nothing vs rats driving and seeing if the rats doing nothing were more stressed than the driving rats, meaning the driving rats were actually lowering their baseline stress.
What if it's the opposite? What if rats that do nothing are under a higher stress and driving simply allows them to get back to their baseline stress?
That’s a different thing, the actual control was as you describe (measuring stress markers over time).
The thing mentioned appear to be an attempt to confirm some previous study's finding about self-sufficiency, which is pretty much related to what you say about autonomy and control.
Never assume bad science when bad journalism would suffice.
Furthermore, the rats that lived in enriched environments drove for the joy of driving, whereas the standard caged rats only drove for the food rewards.
"As hypothesized, the animals living in the enriched environment performed better at the driving test, indicating that they did a better job at learning a new complex skill. The enriched rats also maintained a strong interest in the car, even after the reward of food was removed.
On the other hand, the researchers were surprised at the lack of interest shown by the non-enriched rats and their level of underachievement shown in the driving task. "
Until they put the rats in rush hour traffic, then see how relaxed they are :-)
This was a really a fun paper, I'd love to see it reproduced. Perhaps they could compare mice behavior to rat behavior, although given their size it might be more interesting to train a mouse to ride a tiny motorcycle.
I took my first driving lesson on an automatic today, and it was kind of a surreal out of body experience. I felt like I was playing a video game. Maybe because I could control something that was moving the world around me?
Reminds me of the chapter of Blink where Gladwell delves into the correlation between a doctor's bedside manner / tone of voice and the likelihood of them being sued for malpractice. The whole thesis of the chapter seems to be that people are more willing to sue docs who are less nice, and then at the end he says if you don't like your doc, your intuition is probably right!
The story is that learning to drive relaxes rats.