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Every Other, Every Time - Rat Imitative Pattern Learning, Peter A. Khouri

Undergraduate Honours Theses

Keshen (2011) showed that rats better learned to find visually-distinctive food locations arranged in a circle after watching an expert demonstrator rat forage in the setting. Phillips (2013) failed to find a similar imitative effect when 6 of 12 visually-identical food towers, also arranged in a circle, were consistently baited, but in a random pattern. The present experiment was designed to determine whether rats could display imitative learning using a more-regular pattern. Eight rats were assigned to be either demonstrators or observers. The experimental arena contained 12 identical food towers in a circular formation with every other tower baited. In …