Human and Rat Behavioral Variability in the Dashiell Maze: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract

To assess their orientation in mazes, Dashiell (1930) developed a procedure allowing rats to reach the goal by utilizing paths of equal distance from the starting point. The main finding was the variety of new pathways that the subjects took to reach the goal. Given the need for a task that might evaluate behavioral variability in humans, a simulation of the Dashiell procedure was developed: a virtual maze for human participants. With the goal of validating an animal model task for assessing human behavior variability, this study presents an experiment comparing rat and human performance when traversing a Dashiell maze. Results showed that rats in their maze and humans in the virtual version had similar path variability for reaching the goal, although humans showed higher dispersion from the mean. We conclude that the adaptive function of route variability in rats is similar to that in humans; thus, the virtual Dashiell maze could become a reliable and straightforward task for assessing human behavior variability. Our study encourages the use of virtual mazes to compare behavioral variability between humans and other species