Team 4 Project in Psychology and Neuroscience: Olfactory and Spatial Processing in Rats
Lucy Chen, Tiffany Dharia, Sarah Kim, Anish Kumar, Erica Lee, Alex Lin, Sophia Liu, Ryan O’Connell, Jiyoun Park, Vishnu Prasath, Maxwell Sauberman, Alana Tartaro
Advisor: Graham Cousens
Assistant: Sam Giugliano
ABSTRACT
This study was designed to observe the ability of rats to perform tasks that require a cognitive function, transitive inference. Transitive inference is defined as the ability to infer a tertiary relationship given two prior comparisons. Twenty Sprague-Dawley rats were tested in two environments. In the Experiment 1, ten rats learned a hierarchy of odor relationships in which certain odors were rewarded in the presence of other odors. Similarly, in Experiment 2, the remaining ten rats learned relationships between various locations through situational stimuli. In Experiment 3, an electrophysiological test of odor stimuli was used to evaluate the specific neural response to novel odors.