Three Interesting Findings: Animal Cognition Edition
Chickens are self-aware, rats have imaginations, and chimps understand scale models
Chickens may be self-aware. A recent paper tackled this issue by asking: Do chickens recognize their reflections as themselves? The traditional mirror-recognition test says no. But a new, more ecologically valid test suggests they might: Roosters produce predator warning calls in the presence of another chicken but not in the presence of a mirror. Here’s the abstract of the paper; you can read the whole thing here.
Rats have imaginations. That’s the conclusion, at least, of a fascinating new paper in Science magazine. Here’s how a press release summarized the paper:
A team from the Lee and Harris labs developed a novel system combining virtual reality and a brain-machine interface to probe the rat’s inner thoughts.
They found that, like humans, animals can think about places and objects that aren’t right in front of them, using their thoughts to imagine walking to a location or moving a remote object to a specific spot.
Like humans, when rodents experience places and events, specific neural activity patterns are activated in the hippocampus, an area of the brain responsible for spatial memory. The new study finds rats can voluntarily generate these same activity patterns and do so to recall remote locations distant from their current position…
“To imagine is one of the remarkable things that humans can do. Now we have found that animals can do it too, and we found a way to study it,” says [co-author] Albert Lee.
Chimps understand scale models. This was shown in a clever 2002 study, in which chimps shown a toy version of an object hidden in a scale model of their enclosure were then able to find the real object hidden in the same place in the real enclosure. Amazing!
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