Rats Regret Missed Moments
Rodents who made bad decisions and ended up with inferior food options later regretted their impatience, neuro-scientists from the University of Minnesota revealed this week in a report in scientific journal Nature Neuroscience.
Study chief Professor David Redish said rats who made the wrong decision when deciding how long to wait to pick the best food option, moderated their behaviour in future tests to avoid missing out on what they should have done as opposed to the actual reward.
“Regret is the recognition that you made a mistake, that if you had done something else, you would have been better off,” the Professor explained, “The hard part was that we had to separate disappointment, which is just when things aren’t as good as you hoped. The key was letting the rats choose.” (BBC)
In more animal anxiety news, neuroscientists at the University of Bordeaux in France said crayfish given mild electric shots became deeply worried about future shocks, hiding in shadows in fish tanks in contrast to naïve crayfish which cheerfully wandered everywhere.
“Anxiety is different from fear, which is something that even the simplest animals show,” said study chief Daniel Cattaerd in a report in ‘Science’.
“Anxiety is a kind of fear of the fear, and animals who experience it will display adaptive behaviour to minimise the threat,” he added. (Independent)
Details of the crayfishes’ concerns and the rats’ regrets emerged some six years after of study of humans revealed that one in two women in Britain regretted one night stands in contrast to men, 84% of whom felt great afterwards.
The study, carried out by researchers at Durham University coincided with another report on men’s seduction techniques which revealed that ‘two out of three women in clubs agreed to dance with a man after he touched her arm briefly when making his request, reducing to one in three when the same man kept his hands to himself.’
“When it comes to catching a woman’s eye, little beats a winning smile and a touch on the arm,” the Daily Mail suggested. “Research shows something as simple as a gentle brush of a woman’s arm can boost a man’s chances in love.”
In another study on love rats, a survey for sex portal IllicitEncounters.com revealed that amongst people who have affairs,men travel eight times further than women for sex, with one in five happy to travel ‘as far as it takes’.
The survey revealed that philandering men typically travel an average of 131.7 miles per date compared to 16.5 miles for women, the Metro newspaper reported.
“Women wanted to cut a fine balance between being far enough away to be ‘off-territory’, but close enough to home to get back that night,” a website spokesperson told the paper. “
While men said they didn’t believe they were under any suspicion at all by traveling away on a regular basis. But the over-riding factor was that virtually all women said they expected men to travel to them.”
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Jonty Skrufff: https://twitter.com/djjontyskrufff
