Experimental box for testing mirror cognitive abilities of animals

Abstract

The invention discloses an experimental box for testing the mirror cognitive abilities of animals. The box includes a video recording system, a box body, a lighting system, a shelf, a tray, a water pot and glass or mirror. A glass guide rail frame is arranged on the vertical section in the middle of the box body, and the glass or mirror is arranged in the glass guide rail frame. The box body is symmetrically divided into two identical spaces to enhance the cognition of the animals to specular reflection. The four sides of the box body are made of glass to help animals feel natural light or simulate natural light illumination for the animals; a glass door is arranged on one glass surface of the box body to facilitate come-in and go-out. The tray is arranged at the bottom of a metal wire frame of the box body to facilitate cleaning of animal excrement and garbage. The implementation of the above measures aims to avoid stress response caused by frequent catching. The experimental box, which satisfies the natural properties of animal visual sensory organs to the greatest extent and reduces environment and human intervention, has the advantages that the structure is simple, an experiment is convenient to implemented and the experimental effect is good.

Description

technical field [0001] The invention relates to an animal cognition experiment device, in particular to an experiment box for detecting the mirror cognition ability of animals. Background technique [0002] Existing experimental devices for testing the mirror cognition ability of animals usually place the mirror close to the edge of the box. There is a defect in this way of placing the mirror surface side by side. Because the animal cannot go behind the mirror, it cannot explore the mirror in an all-round way. An individual that makes it take longer for the animal to understand the specular reflection may even cause the animal to fail to understand the specular reflection, yielding a false negative result. Moreover, this way of placing the mirror cannot eliminate the influence of the background in the mirror on the animals. For example, the animal's preference for facing the mirror may be due to the expansion of the sense of space by the mirror, not because the virtual imag...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

There are defects in this light source setting method, which cannot simulate natural sunlight well, especially for birds with four-color vision, the lack of ultraviolet light will greatly weaken the bird's vision, and the establishment of mirror cognition is difficult. Strong dependence on vision, so animals with tetrachromatic vision such as birds cannot perform visual recognition well, and thus cannot understand specular reflection

[0004] In addition, the existing experimental devices for testing the cognitive ability of animals usually require frequent grasping of animals, and it is not possible to let animals live in the experimental box for a long time after grasping animals, and then take them out after all experiments are completed. Due to the difficulty of existing experimental setups to solve the cleaning problem when the animals are in it

This frequent grasping of the animal will cause the animal to be stressed and unable to focus on the experiment itself, which will affect the animal's exploration of the plane mirror and may cause false negative results

Images