Rats With Maps A Revolution in Psychology In 1948 Edward C. Tolman undermined the standards of Psychology, pushed the status quo, and gave us a new insight into human behavior. How you may ask? Well, with rats of course! At the University of California, Tolman was performing experiments which sought to demonstrate complex internal cognitive activity in creatures such as rats. He theorized a concept he coined “cognitive maps”, or mental representations as we know it today. In simpler terms, take a second to close your eyes. Now try to imagine the layout of your home, think of it’s rooms, doors, furniture, the Oreos you keep under your bed in case of emergencies, etc.. Chances are you were able to form a picture in your mind of those places and your relative location to them. Tolman believed rats could do this too. With learning theorist’s major form of research being rats in mazes at the time, his opposition challenged their notion that internal mental processes did not need to accompany observable stimuli and response.
Latent Learning Tolman’s article in 1948 contained studies which
supported his views, two of those studies included mazelearning rats. The first study was the “latent learning” experiment. This experiment started with three groups of rats, labeled C, N, and D. All of these groups were exposed to the same complex maze, the difference being their reward. Group C always had food at the end of the maze, every day. Group N never received any reward. Finally, group D received a delayed reward. For the first ten days, group D was treated the same as group N. After the eleventh day, group D was then treated the same as group C. Here is a graph of the results, showing the error rates over the course of eighteen days for the three groups.
The main focus of these results is group D, for they demonstrated a form of learning that takes place without any obvious reinforcement of the behavior.
They began showing the same progress as group C ten days into the experiment, after food became a reward. The reasoning behind this is that during those ten days they must’ve been learning how to navigate the maze without outwardly showing it.
Built in GPS The second study was titled the “Spatial Orientation” experiment. Here Tolman wanted to prove that rats understand their location in space, that they could find the reward relative to the starting point, even if parts of the maze are changed or removed. He first had rats learn a simple maze, which they perfected. After they learnt the location of the reward, the route to it was changed. Now there were twelve tunnels branching off in different directions. Of the twelve tunnels, the sixth one came closest to where the reward use to be, but the eleventh tunnel was made to look like the first turn in the original maze. As Tolman suspected, the majority of rats went down the six tunnel, demonstrating the maps produced gave the organisms a cognitive “lay of the land”. They had an understanding of the relative location of the reward, rather than building a basic strip map of the maze.