[Gpdd] behaviour: cognitive abilities: mind map

[Mikey]

Hi,
I sent the cognitive test that someone (the psychologist, sorry forgot your 
name) sent to the list to my sister, she is also a psychologist and 
currently taking care of my guinea pigs and I thought she might like this 
test.
As a response I got the following question from her to post on de gpdd:

"I would like to do the following experiment with my guinypigs (ed. my 
sisters'guinea pigs, mikey) but i'm not so
talented in the carpenterarea. So if anyone is able to do this please let me
know. if you look at the added file you see a slide wich contains a map. 
(since I guess I cannot send attachments to the list, look at this link for 
the map: http://emxn.com/misc/MentalMaps.doc)
As you probably know (if you are a psychologist) the behaviorists, lightly 
put,
assumed that we, or at least animals, are just stimulus-response boxes. Most
of you know that your piggies are very good at learning such reactions, just
the opening of the fridge is enough to get your piggy excited (classical
conditioning, pavlov-reflex). The most famous example is the dog that
learned that he received food after hearing a bell, after a while just
hearing the bell was enough to let the dog produce saliva. Tolman critisized
this when he found out that rats are able to form mental maps. if you let
your rat (or in my case my piggy) run through the maze, after some trials he
will probably find out that the shortest route to the cheese (or carrot) is
to go just straight ahead. It becomes interesting when you place blocks in
the maze. because, depending on the position of the block (A or B) the rat
(or, hopefully the piggy) will know which way to go, left or right. And he
(hopefully) will make very little mistakes doing this. Which proves that
they are more than just silly stimulus-response boxes that run randomly into
one of the corridors, they can form mental maps. Which is more difficult
than just forming a stimulus response connection.

Thanks for your responses, in a little more than a month I'm getting to see 
my guinea pigs again, I am very interested how they look by then and if they 
still recognise me!!
Mikey
-- 
pandameisje at gmail.com
pandameisje at hotmail.com
m.p.staaks at st.hanze.nl
Blog: http://emxn.com/mikey
Foto's: http://emxn.com/gallery/mikey