Seminar 4 - Oct. 26, 2009

Of all the articles that we read this week, I was most intrigued by 'The Influence of Natural Variations in Maternal Care on Play Fighting in the Rat' by Parent and Meaney. The findings were quite remarkable in many respects. Mostly, it gave me new insight into the cognitive capacities of rats that I had not known prior. I was surprised to find out that rats share so many emotional characteristics with humans. I would be very interested to see further studies that could tease out and uncover the correlations between the 'low LG' and 'high LG' females. In all the graphs presented, there is a clear demarcation and consistent trend within the female subgrouping. I was surprised and impressed to see how accurately this study depicted the highly valid results of the gender differences amongst the rat populations studied.

My only issue, as I presented in class and as discussed in the audio podcast, is the issue of generalizability of the animal model to the human model. I most definitely see the advantage of studies between animals and humans due to their many similarities. I, however, do not think that the correlations are as direct as some might assume. Just in examining cortical structure and the immense amount of differences that are apparent between human and rat behaviours, it is difficult to predict the exact mechanism by which 'anogenital licking' in rats can be generalized to a behaviour in humans. It appears that there may be tens of different behaviours in humans that can correspond to the rat licking behaviour. Perhaps in the future, a meta-analysis could be performed to determine which form of human behaviour most closely mimics the behaviours of rats. This type of study might unveil the characteristics that we have in common with our ancient evolutionary ancestry. I feel that these types of studies could most definitely benefit society as a whole in the coming decades if we could adequately correlate animal behaviour to our own.