I wonder if there’s any way to measure rationality in animals.
Bear with me for a second. The Cognitive Reflection Test is a measure of how well you can avoid the intuitive-but-wrong answer and instead make the more mentally laborious calculation. The Stroop test is also a measure of how well you can avoid making impulsive mistakes and instead force yourself to focus only on what matters. As I recall, the “restrain your impulses and focus your thinking” skill is a fairly “biological” one—it’s consistently associated with activity in particular parts of the brain, influenced by drugs, and impaired in conditions like ADHD.
Could we—or have we already—design a variant of this made out of mazes that rats could run through?
I might look into this more carefully myself, but does anyone know off the top of their heads?
See Rosati et al., The Evolutionary Origins of Human Patience: Temporal Preferences in Chimpanzees, Bonobos, and Human Adults, Current Biology (2007). Similar to the marshmallow test.
You can certainly train animals to override their instincts and then measure how well that goes. I don’t know how much would it tell you about “rationality”, though...
I wonder if there’s any way to measure rationality in animals.
Bear with me for a second. The Cognitive Reflection Test is a measure of how well you can avoid the intuitive-but-wrong answer and instead make the more mentally laborious calculation. The Stroop test is also a measure of how well you can avoid making impulsive mistakes and instead force yourself to focus only on what matters. As I recall, the “restrain your impulses and focus your thinking” skill is a fairly “biological” one—it’s consistently associated with activity in particular parts of the brain, influenced by drugs, and impaired in conditions like ADHD.
Could we—or have we already—design a variant of this made out of mazes that rats could run through?
I might look into this more carefully myself, but does anyone know off the top of their heads?
See Rosati et al., The Evolutionary Origins of Human Patience: Temporal Preferences in Chimpanzees, Bonobos, and Human Adults, Current Biology (2007). Similar to the marshmallow test.
You can certainly train animals to override their instincts and then measure how well that goes. I don’t know how much would it tell you about “rationality”, though...