Institute of Psychology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland.
Sci Rep. 2019 May 8;9(1):7111. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-42924-1.
The animal preference for complexity is most clearly demonstrated when the environmental change takes the form of an increase in complexity. Therefore, one of the potential difficulties in interpretation is that the preference for perceptual novelty may be confounded with the change in environmental complexity. In this study, the environmental complexity was controlled by manipulating with tunnels inside the experimental chamber. Adding new tunnels triggered a very profound change in behaviour, which was demonstrated by the animals' prolonged stay in the proximity of the novel objects, sniffing, touching, and climbing on top of the tunnels. The removal of the tunnels from the test arena turned out to have the least influence on behaviour compared to the other manipulations used in this study. The reduction of complexity of the tunnels had a moderate effect on rat behavior. Tunnels are important elements in the rats' environment, since they provide various possibilities for hiding, resting or moving inside the tunnel. They may be treated as a good example of affordances in rat-environment interactions. The results of this study may therefore serve as a basis for constructing a modified theory of animal curiosity which could incorporate the concept of ecological psychology.
当环境变化表现为复杂性增加时，动物对复杂性的偏好最明显。因此，解释的一个潜在困难是，对感知新奇的偏好可能与环境复杂性的变化混淆。在这项研究中，通过在实验室内的隧道内进行操作来控制环境的复杂性。添加新的隧道会引发非常深刻的行为变化，这表现为动物在新物体附近停留时间延长，嗅探、触摸和爬上隧道。与本研究中使用的其他操作相比，从测试场地中移除隧道对行为的影响最小。隧道的复杂性降低对大鼠行为的影响适中。隧道是大鼠环境中的重要元素，因为它们为大鼠在隧道内的藏身、休息或移动提供了各种可能性。它们可以被视为大鼠与环境相互作用中可供性的一个很好的例子。因此，这项研究的结果可以作为构建一种可以包含生态心理学概念的动物好奇心修正理论的基础。
