by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London
Conjure up a stereotypical image of a scientist and they likely will have a white coat. If not brandishing test tubes, you might imagine them working with mice scurrying around a maze. In future the scientists may well be doing a lot of programming, and the mice for their part will be scurrying around in their own virtual world wearing Virtual Reality goggles.
Scientists have long used mazes as away to test the intelligence of mice, to the point it has entered popular culture as a stereotypical thing that scientists in white lab coats do. Mazes do give ways to test intelligence of animals, including exploring their memory and decision making ability in controlled experiments. That can ultimately help us better understand how our brains work too, and give us a better understanding of intelligence. The more we understand animal cognition as well as human cognition, the more computer scientists can use that improved understanding to create more intelligent machines. It can also help neurobiologists find ways to improve our intelligence too.
Flowers for Algernon is a brilliant short story and later novel based on the idea, there using experiments on mice and humans to test surgery intended to improve intelligence. In a slightly different take on mice-maze experiments, Douglas Adams, in ‘The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’, famously claimed that the mice were actually pan-dimensional beings and these experiments were really incredibly subtle experiments the mice were performing on humans. Whatever the truth of who is experimenting on who, the experiments just took a great leap forward because scientists at Northwestern University have created Virtual Reality goggles for their mice.
For a long time researchers at Northwestern have used a virtual reality version of maze experiments, with mice running on treadmills with screens around them projecting what the researchers want them to see, whether mazes, predators or prey. This has the advantage of being much easier to control than using physical mazes, and as the mice are actually stationary the whole time , just running on a treadmill, brain-scanning technology can be used to see what is actually happening in their brains while facing these virtual trials. The problem though is that the mice, with their 180 degree vision, can still see beyond the edges of the screens. The screens also give no sense of 3 dimensions, when like us the mice naturally see in 3D. As the screens are not fully immersive, they are not fully natural and that could affect the behaviour of the mice and so invalidate the experimental results.
That is why the Northwestern researchers invented the mousey VR googles, the idea being that they would give a way to totally immerse the mice in their online world, and so improve the reliability of the experiments. In the current version the goggles are not actually worn by the mice, as they are still too heavy. Instead, the mouse’s head is held in place really close to them, but with the same effect of total immersion. Future versions may be small enough for the mice to wear them though.
The scientists have already found that the mice react more quickly to events, like the sight of a predator, than in the old set-up, suggesting that being able to see they were in a lab was affecting their behaviour. Better still, there are new kinds of experiment that can be done with this set up. In particular, the researchers have run experiments where an aerial predator like an owl appears from above the mice in a natural way. Mounting screens above them previously wasn’t possible as it got in the way of the brain scanning equipment. What does happen when a virtual owl appears? The mice either run faster or freeze, just as in the wild. This means that by scanning their brains while this is happening, how their perception of the threat works can be investigated, as well as how decision-making is taking place at the level of their brain activity. The scientists also intend to run similar experiments where the mouse is the predator, for example chasing a virtual fly too. Again this would not have been possible previously.
That in any case is what we think the purpose of these new experiments is. What new and infinitely subtle experiments it is allowing the pan-dimensional mice to perform on us remains to be seen.
More on …
- Exploring mazes, inventing algorithms
- Mousemat maze puzzles [on Teaching London Computing]
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EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1.
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