Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Science I Think I Might Smell a Rat
Posted by Paul Constant on Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 12:05 PM
Rats are capable of metacognitive thought, described more simply as thinking about thinking:
Scientists at the University of Georgia tasked rats with identifying “short” and “long” noises. Rodents that answered correctly were given six food pellets; those that answered wrong got nothing. So far, so Pavlovian. But the rats were also given a third option: If they declined to take the test, they received three food pellets. Most of the rats refused to identify the noises that were hardest to classify — thus suggesting a surprisingly evolved sense of their own knowledge and abilities.
If this is true, I'm even more creeped out by rats than I was yesterday.
(Via Maud)
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1
Confidential to goth kids: This still doesn't mean your rat "loves" you. Get a hamster, they're cuter.
2
I've never gotten the creeped out by rats thing. They're f'ing cute!
Granted wild rats can have cooties, but so do most wild animals.
Granted wild rats can have cooties, but so do most wild animals.
4
You'd be even more creeped out if you had to clean a couple dead ones, and all of their residual shit, out of your garage like I did this past weekend. At least one of them I got to kill myself.
7
Well, having skimmed the original paper, I'm less than impressed. The entire result was based on 3 -- yep, that's the teensy small number 3 -- rats. They started with 8, but 5 rats didn't get with the program and sometimes didn't do anything.
This is not conclusive, not matter how good the damn statistics are. This is an invitation to do it again, with more rats.
This is not conclusive, not matter how good the damn statistics are. This is an invitation to do it again, with more rats.
11
@Douglasf, they "love" you as much as a dog would. They recognize you, learn their names, learn simple commands, like to hang out in your lap, get depressed if you're gone, etc. They're much smarter than a hamster. And don't bite unless they're psycho or mistreated.
12
At least they don't have to take ginkgo biloba anymore, since it's not useful for dementia.
Next up - why hamsters are excessively cute.
Next up - why hamsters are excessively cute.
13
I don't think people are specially evolved with abilities and emotions seperate from other living things. These are survival techniques developed early in our evolution.
15
As a Ratophile, I will say they are just as cognitively developed as dogs, perhaps more. Even perhaps more developed than some people I know.... My rats come when called, love to play tag, love to eat my shoes. I luvs me some ratties!!!
16
Anybody who says that rats are as smart as dogs has never owned a smart breed of dog. Speaking as someone who has owned a smart dog and has lived with the (supposedly) smart rats of a roommate.
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