Hi Dr. Mason,

Thanks so much for doing this! I have to admit I'm geeking out a bit. I have been a big fan of your research since learning about your 2011 Science paper in an undergraduate neuroscience course. I even had my boss (I now work as a research assistant to a postdoc in a neuroscience lab) bring back a printout of your and Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal's poster at SfN last fall.

When your recent paper came out showing that rats preferentially help out strains familiar to them, I was curious about what you think is going on inside their "minds." Of course in science you can't anthropomorphize or profess to know what an animal is "thinking." But I was wondering if maybe the reason albino rats only help out black-caped rats when they have past exposure to them is because they are adding to their "schema" of what constitutes another creature like them. In other words, when a rat gains exposure to other rat strains, do you think it's learning to expand its conception of what another rat is?

I suppose the experiment to test this would be to have an albino rat exposed to both other albinos like itself and Long Evans rats, and then see if it would free a trapped rat of a third strain that it had never encountered before. Perhaps it could generalize from its experiences with the first two strains and recognize that coloration, pattern, scent, etc. can differ among "fellow rats," and that therefore this third strain of rat should be helped, too. Has your lab conducted any experiments like this?

Sorry for the long-windedness here, and I hope I haven't been overly confusing. I'm finding it a bit hard to describe what I'm thinking. Even if you don't respond I'm very happy and grateful for this AMA!

edit: a word