The Free Science Fair Projects Network

Science Fair Project

Title:	Musical Rat Mazes
Category:	Zoology
Student Researchers:	A. & M. Clos
School:
Grade:	6
Teacher:
Awards:

Purpose

The purpose of my experiment is to find out what kind of music helps a rat learn a maze the fastest.

Hypothesis

I think that the rats will learn the maze best with no music, because then there won’t be anything distracting them.

Materials

The materials used in this project were:

Three one-year-old rats (Oreo, Copper, and Maple Sugar)
Three different mazes (made out of cardboard boxes with foam board for dividers)
Three types of music: classical (Charlotte Church), rock (Billy Joel), none
One stopwatch
One ghetto blaster to play the music
Blank data sheets to record the data
Small pieces of jelly bread to put at the end of the maze for the rats to eat

Experimental Design

Because one rat might be smarter than another, and one maze might be harder than another, I rotated the rat/music/maze combinations as follows. This way a smart rat, or an easy maze, was not always used with any one type of music.

Music and rat matrix used for this science project.

The Procedure

Turn on the music.
Put a piece of jelly bread outside the exit door of the maze. Put the rat in the maze through the entrance door and start the stopwatch. When the rat reaches the jelly bread, stop the stopwatch. Record the time on the data sheet.
Repeat this procedure until the rat knows the maze. ----Note: A rat knows the maze when it has gone through it in 20 seconds or less three times in a row.
Give the rat three weeks to forget the maze.
Repeat with another maze.

Research

Rats are very good pets. They are fun to watch and play with. They are friendly and can learn many things. They can learn simple words, such as “come,” their name, and “treat.” They learn who you are by smell, so you shouldn’t wash your hands before you play with them, otherwise they might not recognize you, and might be scared. Also, they don’t like bright lights and loud noises, such as hammers pounding and strobe lights.

Other projects that have been done by professionals show that classical music can make people better at spatial and geometric reasoning, such as putting together a puzzle of a camel. But they also found that the effects wear off rather quickly. One thing they page 6 found is that listening to ten minutes of Beethoven or Mozart would only stimulate the brain for one hour. After that the effects would wear off. The Governor of Georgia has been making hospitals send a CD of classical music home with new mothers. He is doing this because he thinks this will help the babies become smarter, but it really is too soon to tell that.

A different experiment done with rats showed that if a rat listened to 12 hours of classical music a day, it could learn a maze better, and with less mistakes than, a rat who listened to static noises, rock music, or silence for 12 hours a day.

Other tests on preschoolers and kindergarteners showed that if they took piano lessons for seven months, they did better at math than others who took singing lessons for seven months or kids who got no music lessons.

Results

My results are that Oreo learned the mazes quickest, Copper was second, and Maple Sugar took the longest. Every rat learned Maze #1 the quickest, so that was probably the easiest maze. To account for these differences, I used the totals for each music type instead of the individual rats’ times. All the rats’ times totaled up showed that they took the longest to learn a maze to rock music, they took second longest to learn a maze to classical music, and took the shortest amount of time to learn a maze to no music. This was true for both total seconds, and for total runs.

Click on the images to view a larger picture.

This chart shows the data from the following charts totaled up. It is the data I used to make the graphs.

Copper in Maze 1 with no Music
Oreo in Maze 2 with no Music
Maple Sugar in Maze 3 with no Music
Copper in Maze 2 with Classical Music
Oreo in Maze 3 with Classical Music
Maple Sugar in Maze 1 with Classical Music
Copper in Maze 3 with Rock Music
Oreo in Maze 1 with Rock Music
Maple Sugar in Maze 2 with Rock Music

The Conclusion

My hypothesis was correct, that the rats learn a maze best to no music, probably because there is nothing to distract them. In first place was no music, in second place was classical music, and in third place was rock music, at least that’s what my totals showed. Rock music might have been last because it contains more loud noises than classical music, and rats don’t like loud noises.

Maple Sugar in the maze. She may not have turned out to be our most intelligent rat, but she is everybody’s favorite, because she is the sweetest.

Bibliography

Bulla, Gisela, 1998. Fancy Rats. Barron’s Educational Series, Inc., Hauppage, New York. 64 pp.
Ducommon, Debbie, 1998. Rats! Bow Tie Press, Irvine, California. 112 pp.
Knox, Richard A. 1994. Music Power Enhances Brain Function, Boston Globe. http://www.math.niu.edu/~rusin/uses-math/music/learning
Viadero, Debra, 1998. Music on the Mind, Education Week on the Web, http://www.edweek.org/eu/vol-17/30music.h17

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