http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/10/could-robots-be-psychology-s-new-lab-rats

AI-equipped rovers could offer psychologists a new—and highly malleable—model of the brain.

WASHINGTON, D.C. —Sending a mouse through a maze can tell you a lot about how its little brain learns. But what if you could change the size and structure of its brain at will to study what makes different behaviors possible? That’s what Elan Barenholtz and William Hahn are proposing. The cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, both at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, are running versions of classic psychology experiments on robots equipped with artificial intelligence. Their laptop-size robotic rovers can move and sense the environment through a camera. And they’re guided by computers running neural networks–models that bear some resemblance to the human brain.