> How does the animal decide where it wants to seek, or whether it wants to hide? Or what happens when it’s surprised? When it thinks it knows where the experimenter is, what happens in its brain when she isn’t there?
These questions at the end really made me a whole lot more interested in this topic.
And it's interesting to note that she's awarding them with tickles, not food. Could it be why the rats found it to be a more "fun" activity? Would they be having fun or would they become more competitive if rewarded with food instead?
It's hard to tell if there is a clear distinction between social/"fun" and food rewards.
Experiments have shown an "anti-freeloading" effect in most species, except cats: Within reason, a reward for work is preferable over the same reward for no work.
I also don't think cats care specifically whether or not their fun and playing leads to food or not. It just happens that their idea of fun would lead to discovering and killing small animals in a natural setting. Maybe they hunt because it's fun, not just because they are hungry.
The neighbour cat spends ages in my garden in hunting postures staring at insects and occasionally chasing them. Then she'll lie down and enjoy the weather for a bit,continue her patrol and come back a couple of hours later and repeat.
And when I was a kid we had a cat that we eventually discovered liked sitting in the berry bushes in the garden and kill birds. We discovered it because she didn't eat them, but just left them there and we eventually found a whole pile.
She did on occasion hunt for food too, but mostly when the prey was out of the norm, like once when she caught a large rat - only the tail was left. Of course I don't know how much she ate out at night, though.
> Maybe they hunt because it's fun, not just because they are hungry.
My well-fed cat spends most of her time indoors but is allowed out. She doesn’t bring back creatures very often, but a few months back, at the start of summer, one night she killed and brought back (through an open window) three rodents in one night. Each time, she left them in the hallway, came up to the bedroom and meowed until I woke up. Then she lead me to the kill, made absolutely sure I saw it and then left it there, seemingly losing interest. She did it three times that night until I finally just closed the window.
This is a well fed cat and she didn’t attempt to eat her kills; she did not do it for food.
In my experience with cats, they also like to hunt flies, bottle caps, feet, their own tails, leaves blowing in the wind... etc. I think they’re just hard wired to enjoy hunting “things”.
There's a theory that when cats do this they're bringing you food - either to say thank you for feeding them, or because they think you're a big dumb hairless cat who hasn't worked out how to hunt.
It's impossible to know for sure without asking the cat, and the cat isn't telling.
Cats do enjoy chasing and pawing at things - or at least, they're hardwired to chase and paw at things, which is not quite the same. At the very least it seems to scratch an emotional itch for a while.
It's understood in Africa that if you're stalked by a lion, you should either face it and run towards it, or make loud noises to try to scare it away, or maybe both - because if you try to run away, its stalking instinct is triggered and you'll be on the menu.
Cats are complicated, and learning how to communicate with a cat is like learning a non-verbal language. It took us a long time to stop misinterpreting our cat, and it took our cat a while to work out how to communicate more clearly. It's still a work in progress, and surprises continue to happen.
My understanding from the article is that this activity is more natural and social to them then other tasks like solving visual puzzles, playing "video games". So maybe is similar on people playing with their dogs, the animal enjoys the activity and does not need food rewards.
If you want to learn more about this topic, look at the work of Jaak Panksepp. "Archeology of the Mind" is one of the most interesting books I have ever read.
I taught our dog to play hide and seek. For the seeking part, I make him sit in the kitchen and wait while I hide with his toy. Then I yell his name and he has to come find me. For the hiding part, he will take his toy and hide it somewhere like under a couch cushion or under a bedsheet. Then he comes and finds me to go looking for it. If I get too close to finding it then he jumps in and snatches it.
It bothers me more than it should that the human just watches where they go and immediately finds them, instead of actually playing the game with them.
Without getting too far off the reservation, there has to be a non-negligible difference if the human is genuinely searching and surprised to find them, and there is more to observe if it’s taking a while to find them.
Rats are very good at spatial perception, orientation, and manipulation. I have seen them rival really smart dogs in that respect. They certainly also know how to look at the actions of others (humans, rats, whatever) and model their own behavior accordingly.
So this would be right up their alley, and I'm sure everybody's had marvellous fun, another thing of which rats are eminently capable.
I think I'm even more impressed that someone could touch a rat without jumping backward, scared out of their mind like a child. Maybe that's just me :).
Tests like this make me wonder about the ethics of being able to perform experiments and tests on rats; clearly these creatures are smart enough to understand a fairly complex game like hide and seek; at what level do we, as a society, determine that this animal is too self-aware to be experimented on, and that doing so would be an act of cruelty.
Note: Obviously I don't think it's an act of cruelty play hide and seek with a rat; I'm talking about testing food additives and whatnot for cancer.
> I think I'm even more impressed that someone could touch a rat without jumping backward, scared out of their mind like a child. Maybe that's just me :).
I think rats get a bad rep (well, sure, wild ones are disease carriers!). About ten years ago, a housemate of mine had a pet rat (and another friend of mine still has rats, but I’ve never lived with him) and I learned first hand that rats are wonderful creatures: very intelligent, interesting, curious and mischievous. This rat used to collect things and bring them back to his cage (usually crumpled up paper we’d scatter around the room for him, but the funniest was when he stole my housemate’s keys). They’re also incredibly cute.. except for that horrible tail ;-)
If I didn’t have a cat, I would consider a pet rat.
I play hide and seek with my cat and he definitely loves it. He also likes to fetch the rubber balls we have around the house (some of them still hidden in places we don’t know a thing about). Playing with animals is pretty great.
That's an exciting, new discovery that I hope won't find its application in places like whatever department does behavioural design at Facebook, game developers, marketers to make products more addictive ... kind of like when they found out that rats go crazy with irregular rewards :)
A game with noverbal, non-quantifiable, socially interactive rewards rather than loot boxes and vacuous artificial ranks would be a step in the right direction!
With all the hype about the release of classic WoW, I remembered my most satisfying gaming experience playing the original WoW circa 2005, when I communicated peacefully with a member of the opposite faction (non-PvP server, so there was no threat of sudden death). We couldn't chat, but we could gesture, dance, and importantly, throw snowballs to knock each other down (we both had them in our inventory, which was awesome to discover). We played like that for what seemed like an hour, although it was probably closer to 20 minutes. Just Barrens things.
I'd like to see more games where you can explore a world and interact with other players nonverbally, playfully, for the sheer delight of it.
These questions at the end really made me a whole lot more interested in this topic.
And it's interesting to note that she's awarding them with tickles, not food. Could it be why the rats found it to be a more "fun" activity? Would they be having fun or would they become more competitive if rewarded with food instead?