
A Game That Made Rats Jump for Joy - kunkelast
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/09/why-scientists-taught-rats-play-hide-and-seek/597799/
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namanyayg
> 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?

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bayesian_horse
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.

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dkersten
> 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”.

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TheOtherHobbes
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.

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changoplatanero
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.

~~~
xenospn
My dog absolutely loves searching for treats. It's his favorite past time, and
you can see how excited he gets.

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kristofferR
This article has videos:

[https://gizmodo.com/scientists-taught-rats-to-play-hide-
and-...](https://gizmodo.com/scientists-taught-rats-to-play-hide-and-seek-and-
theyr-1838069088)

~~~
thrav
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.

~~~
PorterDuff
Rats are too good at the game given a chance. Given proper hiding places (like
your barn), you'll never find them.

~~~
thrav
If you watch the video, there's only something like 4 hiding holes in the room
though.

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interfixus
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.

~~~
bayesian_horse
I'm sure the rats would have preferred to do this without implanted
electrodes...

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tombert
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.

~~~
dkersten
> 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.

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paganel
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.

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michalu
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 :)

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pawelmurias
Addictive free to plays games being actually fun seems like an improvement in
a way.

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nessunodoro
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.

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HNLurker2
Very kind way to normie animal suffering

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throwaway-1436
The other animals that seem to have a lot of intelligence are crows. They're
birds but act like social primates: [https://www.thedodo.com/in-the-
wild/crows-bring-gifts-to-kin...](https://www.thedodo.com/in-the-wild/crows-
bring-gifts-to-kind-woman).

