Abstract
Relationship between habituation and intelligence test performance of rats. Work has been undertaken using 41 Wistar rats to test if habituation correlated with their performance in a task involving more complex learning. Habituation of the startle response to an irrelevant acoustic stimulus was measured in 90 trials over 3 sessions at 48 hour intervals while they performed the task of pressing a lever to obtain food. These tasks were correlated with performance in ten different intelligence problems adapted for the Hebb and Williams rat maze (1946). The hypothesis was that the better their performance in the intelligence test, the better and the faster would be their habituation. The results verified the hypothesis. Once the influence of previous learning and of pressing the lever are eliminated, significant partial correlations appear, indicating that a better performance in the Test corresponds to lower overall reactivity and higher long-term habituation.
