While conducting research on decision-making in rats, the University of Minnesota's David Redish and his graduate student, Adam Steiner, made a different discovery. The pair saw that when a rat made a mistake, it stopped and looked backwards, as if it felt regret.
As Wired reports, the two decided to create an experiment that should cause rats to have regret, then measured the behavioral and neurophysiological markers that are consistent with the feeling. They taught rats to go into a contraption called "restaurant row" that had four different sections serving various flavors of pellets at different intervals (for example, a cherry-flavored pellet might come out in eight seconds, while a banana-flavored pellet could take 20 seconds).
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