The connection to selfies is really weak. Its just classical conditioning. The stimulus is the food not the selfie taking, and the continued pressing of the selfie button without food is conditioned response.
As a sidenote: Social media has been described as a skinner box a million times before, but expressing it literally like this is, IMO, clever, interesting, and also cute. The idea using scientific experiments as metaphor to make art is cool, and I hope people start to do more things like this.
It's art. How you interpret it is sort of the point. It's not science, it's someone trying to make you think, and it seems like you thought in response to it. Successful art then.
Yeah, it is art. It wants to be interesting nested in many layers. I still don't buy this.
It is not a functional piece of the "experiment", but I don't think it was ever meant to be functional or a real experiment. The artist says the rats don't recognize themselves, so I would assume they predicted the selfies would do nothing.
The selfie taking is the only interesting part of the piece, imo. Without that, it's just replicating an 80 year old experiment that has already been replicated to death.
Isn't the idea that the compulsion to take a selfie being classical conditioning the very point of the piece?
My killjoy answer is: give the rat two tunnels. The rat can see partway into the tunnel from the entrance. One tunnel has a selfie inside. The other tunnel has a picture of the wall in the background of the selfie. Add more tunnels and check which tunnels the rat prefers.
My artistic answer: give yourself the pleasure of assuming that the rats like the selfies.
And this part is using an extinction schedule. When you provide a reward for a behavior consistently and then take away the reward (extinction), the behavior tends to stop immediately. By randomizing the reward and maybe gradually decreasing the frequency you have a much better chance that the behavior will persist without the reward. Because he did this we can't really be sure the selfies are their own reward, since the rats may have been simply trained to push a button.
But really this is a variant of the mirror test. These rats were freshly adopted and have probably never seen a mirror, and have no idea what they look like. If they were given a mirror for a while before running this experiment, we might see different behavior.
I found a paper [0] suggesting that rats do recognize other rats in mirrors, still photos, and video, but the results aren't very strong. I think the theory is that their eyesight is pretty poor and they rely mostly on scent to identify other rats.
It's like saying "people have been painting realistic portraits of women for centuries, Leonardo, and this one doesn't add anything or illuminate the subject of portrait-taking further. Still, I appreciate her ambiguous smile."
This would be a stronger point itself if you didn't succinctly validate it with the second sentence of your initial post!
* More likes -> more food
* Retweets -> better food
* More followers -> larger cage
One might argue that the fact we still argue over something shows the need for such art. Perhaps some people could use that slightest nudge. But I find these works often subtly disingenuous, and maybe serve better to reinforce a crowd’s own thinking. Like I heard taking shallow versions of opposing views tends to just strengthen already held beliefs, might some art be the same?
Neat little art project, but it's not that insightful when you think outside the 34th percentile.
That is what literally what "conditioned" means. You're belabouring a point that OP is already making, and then following that up by sneering at the "34th percentile". Maybe the real art is always in the comments section.
I don't believe I am. I'll try to clarify.
> That is what literally what "conditioned" means.
Yes and no. I'm suggesting that attributing the effect merely to "conditioning" is reductionist. There's some level of conditioning to all biological behavior, and repeating a behavior in response to a reward is not entirely irrational. In principle, it's very rational for rats to keep returning to perform an action they know through experience provided food at some point. The rats in this art project aren't necessarily as thoughtless as conveniently suggested by the conditioning explanation. There's plenty of evidence that rats have the ability to remember details about the past and plan for the future.
> and then following that up by sneering at the "34th percentile".
I didn't mean it that way, and in retrospect I admit shouldn't have said that. It was rude but that's truly not the attitude I had in mind. Apologies to whom I was replying to.