RAT RACE: Viewed from above its enclosure, a lab rat pokes its nose into a device designed to test its decision-making abilities.SANTIAGO JARAMILLO
Rats are smart, and mice are dumb. For more than a century, this was the prevailing dogma among scientists who study how brains make choices based on sensory inputs—the type of researchers who train rodents to run mazes in order to uncover mechanisms of long-term memory, problem solving, and other cognitive tasks.
When Anthony Zador set up his lab 15 years ago at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, he and his colleagues began developing “tricks to train rats.” After several years, he says, “we were pretty confident that [rats] can process sensory stimuli and make decisions about them—that they have attentional processes.” At the same time, researchers were generating a wealth of genetic and molecular tools in mice, allowing the visualization and manipulation ...
