The thinking rat: The new science of animal learning

For more than a century, the albino rat has been the standard subject in psychological research. Among other reasons, the rat was thought to be the perfect animal model of human behavior due to the presumed simplicity of its behavior, considered to be mechanistically controlled by the environment and, thus, free from the unnecessary complication caused by the influence of mental processes. In the last few years, a series of critical experiments have been conducted to understand the rat's mental abilities, finding evidence of sophisticated cognitive processes - some of which previously believed to be exclusively human. The rat, it turns out, is a good animal model of human cognition as well; its behavior is no more "reflexive" than it is "reflective". This book tells the story of the albino rat in the psychology laboratory, and how recent studies in animal cognition have changed our perception of its mental life. This is the story of the thinking rat.