Continuing my notes from draft #3 of this week –
Discussion: There were many critics of his research. One of the biggest reasons as to why there was so much criticism was due to the fact that such type of experiment and also his theory have never been performed nor wondered about. What was the role of nature in a humans development? Is it correct to assume that all the results of this experiment applied to humans as well? These were the big questions. The researchers answered honestly saying that, no, we cannot assume that this applies to humans as well but we can assume that these results can be used for further research (as technology develops) which is the most important aspect of our results. This was a very broad criticism but there were more specific questions posed. Critics said that the differences in the brains of enriched v. impoverished environments could be due to stress and handling, since the rats from the enriched environment were handled 2 times a day and the impoverished rats weren’t handled at all. Rosenzweig tested this by setting up an experiment where he put rats in the same type of environment (but two separate cages) and handled one set of rats 2 times a day and the other set zero times a day and he found that there were no differences in brain size, weight and cortex to sub-cortex ratios. Even in later studies of the main experiment, they handled all the rats the same and they found no differences. Some critics also said that stress could have caused the differences they saw and not the enriched environment experience. But other evidence from separate research saw no differences either.
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