The Behavioral Science Maze

From Maze

The maze also has cultural resonance because of its role in behavioral research. Mazes have been used as laboratory environments for rats and mice, and as means of testing these rodents. The depiction of mazes in certain cultural productions reflects this aspect of the maze. For instance, images of rats in a maze are prominent in Alex Proyas' 1998 film Dark City. Dr. Schreber, a captive human who works with his alien captors, is shown looking down on a rat in a large, intricate maze; the rat and the maze connect figuratively to the people in the film and the titular city, which is constructed for the purpose of an experiment. In Daniel Keyes' novel Flowers for Algernon (1966; first published as a short story in 1959), a white mouse with augmented intelligence demonstrates his abilities by traversing a maze. Algernon parallels the novel's protagonist, Charlie, in many ways: The success of the intelligence-enhancing procedure performed on him leads to its being done to Charlie. This sort of maze has been important to mention in less mainstream literary practices, too. The co-founder of the influential French group Oulipo, Raymond Queneau, famously described the members of this group, who set writing constraints for themselves, as "rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape."

Editorial cartoons and cartoons in The New Yorker [e.g., New Yorker cartoon: July 3, 2006] depict mazes of all sorts, but make particularly frequent and interesting use of the psychologist's maze. Cartoons sometimes employ rats as characters and sometimes substitute people for amusing effect. The rat's maze is also a staple in advertising. A 2006 TV commercial for the Game Boy Micro, for instance, shows a rat traversing a maze and finding one as its reward. Besides these abundant fictional depictions of research mazes, pet owners and students have also put dozens of videos of rats and mice running mazes up on YouTube. Even though this experimental use of mazes is specialized and recent - not much more than a century old - it clearly became and remains a part of the popular consciousness.

Intriguingly, the first maze constructed for rats by researchers, which was built in the late 1890s, was not for testing the creatures. Willard Small of Clark University built a maze environment for rats to eat and exercise in when they weren't taking part in experiments. Small wanted the environment to simulate the burrows that rats inhabited in nature. But rather than look at the specifics of how these burrows are laid out, he modeled the first laboratory rat maze "after the Hampton Court Palace maze, a trapezoidal hedge maze that dates in its present form to 1690 but was probably built in the early sixteenth century by the first owner of the palace, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey" (Lemov 2005, p. 25). The maze was first given to rats so that they could relax - for restorative purposes quite consonant with the purposes for which the Hampton Court Palace maze was built. It made for an unusual continuity in the history of the maze, with the researchers treating the rats like aristocrats.

This thread would be broken when John B. Watson took up the maze and used it, initially in his dissertation research, to determine whether rats could make their way through it under different conditions. Watson, who became the youngest person to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1903, continued his work by systematically blinding rats and maiming them in other ways to deprive them of different senses after they had learned their way through a maze. His work attracted public attention, and he was denounced in a New York Times editorial as a torturer. Watson, however, was sure of his behavioral science agenda and that the same principles that applied to rats applied to people. By 1916 he had moved on to experiments with infants. While he didn't mutilate them, in a 1920 experiment that became famous he did condition one, "Little Albert," to fear a furry white rat and furry white things in general.

The use of mazes in experiments with rats increased greatly during the 1920s. We now associate behaviorism, the perspective that all animal and human actions are behaviors, mainly with another American scientist, B. F. Skinner. Skinner's operant conditioning chamber, also known as the Skinner box, is another famous environment for laboratory animals that was built decades after Watson's mazes. While Skinner's name is better known today, Watson's maze remains emblematic - and similar environments remain in use today.

In 1959, one of the earliest computer programs written for fun - an example of "recreational computing" - depicted an experimenter's maze. The program, which is possibly the first computer program to draw a maze of any sort, was written for the TX-0 at MIT by Douglas T. Ross and John E. Ward. The TX-0 was an experimental computer built at MIT's Lincoln Laboratories along the way to the construction of the TX-1. The earlier computer was a transistorized version of Project Whirlwind and, when loaned to the Research Laboratory for Electronics in 1958, provided one of the first opportunities for people to program when not working on an official project. It also allowed programmers to work on the machine interactively, much as Commodore 64 programmers later would, rather than submitting batch jobs in the form of decks of punched cards. In the program that became known as "Mouse in the Maze," a mouse would move through a maze, eating cheese. The mouse could also consume martinis, which would cause it to become disoriented. Here, the environment implemented was not the hedge maze of diversion and fun, but a research maze which was then made playful by the implementation of an amusing reward for the mouse and appropriate behavior.

The rather thin default light-blue diagonal lines produced by 10 PRINT are likely to appear, against the default dark blue background, to be much more like white laboratory maze partitions than like hedges. In that case, the structure that is being represented may be more easily imagined as the maze of behavioral experiments and than the diversionary hedge maze. The regular arrangement of the "walls" in a grid is also more akin to the arrangement of the stereotypical laboratory maze. The output of the program may suggest a puzzle-book maze even more strongly, but if it leads the viewer to think of a structure of some sort, the rat-sized researcher's maze may be the one most likely to come to mind. It wouldn't be outrageous, given that a famous early computer maze - possibly the first - was explicitly based on such a structure.

If some of those who look at this Commodore 64 maze do think of the experimenter's maze, they are sure to make some different further associations. Instead of suggesting that the computer is creating structures or drawings for pure amusement, the idea of the laboratory maze offers something more serious and scientific. It also brings in the idea of the experimenter - at least indifferent to the struggles of the creatures lost in the maze and perhaps cruelly impairing those creatures - and the subject of the experiment, trapped in a bewildering structure created by powers and for purposes beyond comprehension. When 10 PRINT runs, it relentlessly provides a maze, but it does not seem to be trapping us in this maze in any straightforward way. Instead, given the top-down view and the lack of a user-controlled maze walker, the computer may be offering to collaborate with the user in experimenting on virtual rats. This would be a different suggestion than the cinematic, literary, and cartoon representation of behavioral science mazes that encourage people to identify with the rat or mouse. Whoever the rat may be, and whoever the scientist may be, any computer program that evokes the researcher's maze at least hints that the computer is a scientific instrument and that the recent history of science has some darker corners.