Pavlov's......Cockroaches!?! ;)
I guess we are more related to the cockroach than I thought! ;) I got a kick out of this article in which scientists determined that in addition to just humans and dogs, cockroaches can learn a conditioned response to a stimulus associated with food, too! As in the classic Pavlovian experiment, the cockroaches eventually just responded to the stimulus without the food being presented!
What a great 8th grade science project that would make! Now if only I could figure out how to measure the tiny little salivation response.....! ;D
Cockroaches Conditioned to Salivate at a Scent, Not Pavlov’s Dinner Bell
By Henry Fountain
Published: June 19, 2007, The New York Times
More than a century ago, Ivan Pavlov first demonstrated classical conditioning in dogs. The animals learned to associate food with a stimulus - the sound of a bell - such that they would salivate upon hearing the sound even when no food was present.
While conditioned responses have been demonstrated in many animals with many kinds of stimuli over the years, conditioning of salivation has been shown only in one other species, humans. But to those two animals can be added a third: the cockroach.
Makoto Mizunami and Hidehiro Watanabe of Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, placed drops of sugar syrup on the mouths of American cockroaches (Periplaneta americana) while stimulating the insects’ antennas - not with sound, but with peppermint or other scents.
After a number of repetitions, the cockroaches were presented with a scent alone. The researchers found that the insects salivated when the scent was one associated with the sugar syrup.
The finding, published in the open-access online journal PLoS ONE, should open the way for better understanding of the neuronal basis of this kind of learning.
What a great 8th grade science project that would make! Now if only I could figure out how to measure the tiny little salivation response.....! ;D
Cockroaches Conditioned to Salivate at a Scent, Not Pavlov’s Dinner Bell
By Henry Fountain
Published: June 19, 2007, The New York Times
More than a century ago, Ivan Pavlov first demonstrated classical conditioning in dogs. The animals learned to associate food with a stimulus - the sound of a bell - such that they would salivate upon hearing the sound even when no food was present.
While conditioned responses have been demonstrated in many animals with many kinds of stimuli over the years, conditioning of salivation has been shown only in one other species, humans. But to those two animals can be added a third: the cockroach.
Makoto Mizunami and Hidehiro Watanabe of Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, placed drops of sugar syrup on the mouths of American cockroaches (Periplaneta americana) while stimulating the insects’ antennas - not with sound, but with peppermint or other scents.
After a number of repetitions, the cockroaches were presented with a scent alone. The researchers found that the insects salivated when the scent was one associated with the sugar syrup.
The finding, published in the open-access online journal PLoS ONE, should open the way for better understanding of the neuronal basis of this kind of learning.