MONTREAL, Canada – Students and professors at Concordia University in Montreal think they’ve learned some valuable lessons about behavior after studying male rats they mated with female rats in lingerie, then killed to look at their brains.

“In an unusual study, researchers allowed virgin male rats to have sex with females wearing special rodent ‘jackets.’ Later, when scientists gave the males a chance to mate again, the animals preferred to mate with jacket-wearing female rats rather than with unclad ones,” according to LiveScience.com.

“The findings suggest that male animals can learn to associate the sight and feel of clothing with sex.”

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The study basically involved putting a dozen virgin male rats together with receptive female rats with their mini “jackets” and letting them go at it. After that, they put the male rats with two receptive females, one with a jacket and one without, and they preferred jackets on.

Concordia University psychologists Gonzalo R. Quintana Zunino, who conducted the important research with colleague Jim Pfaus, believes the male rats learned that “each time my partner wears lingerie, I’m going to have sex,” Live Science reports.

The evidence was clear.

“The trained male rats chose to mate with the jacket-clad females more often than with the unjacketed females, the researchers found. In addition, the males made more mounting attempts and ejaculated more quickly with the jacketed females,” according to the site.

In an even more astounding experiment, the psychologists mated virgin male rats with receptive jacketed females and unreceptive unjacketed females. When they mated the next time they preferred the jacketed females.

To take their research to the next logical step, the scientists chopped the male rats’ heads open after they mated, injected a special dye in it, then examined the supposed brain activity. The researchers’ preliminary findings seem to indicate that the males that mated with the jacketed females were more excited than those that mated with the naked females.

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“We have the same brain structure and neurochemistry as our rats,” Pfaus told The Huffington Post.

“We can see this in studies of brain activation in humans and rats, even though our patterns of copulation appear utterly different. You can bet if rats are capable of showing such flexibility, we do too.”

In other words, the scientists think the study provides insight into why men are turned on by lingerie.  The Post reports it’s the early experiences that is the big factor.

“For us these stimuli can be the ‘types’ of people we find hot, the clothing they wear, the clothing WE wear, the places, and even arousal driven by doing things that are ‘naughty’ but that are of such high arousal value that the pleasure from sex and/or orgasm(s) is also increased,” Pfaus said.

The eye-opening study was presented at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. in November.