Hide and squeak
By teaching rats to play hide-and-seek, scientists have found a window into the minds of these cleverest of rodents.
Who’d win a game of hide-and-seek between a rat and a human? A rat would certainly have more hidey-holes to choose from. But mastering the game requires more than an ability to squeeze into tight spaces; players must also be able to put themselves into the shoes of the other players, to see things from their perspective. That requires some advanced psychology – even young humans take a while to work out that others don’t stop being able to see you just because you’ve closed your eyes. But new observations strongly suggest that rats are up to the task.
Biologists led by Michael
Brecht at Berlin’s Humboldt University have been training rats to play hide-and-seek with their handlers in order to explore the degree to which the rodents can appreciate another individual’s point of view. It turns out they can play the game rather well, taking turns to be the hider and the seeker, avoiding hiding places they’d used before, choosing opaque hiding places over transparent ones and keeping quiet when hiding.
It’s likely that the clever rodents are able to draw on instinctive escape and foraging behaviours in order to hide and seek successfully, says Brecht. In which case, it might be that their choice of opaque hiding places and their silence while hiding are hard-wired.
A tantalising alternative, though, is that they are taking into account what others can see and hear.
“Many aspects of the rats’ behaviour point to this interpretation,” says Brecht. “They often peek to find out where the seeker is and then reposition themselves behind an obstacle to avoid discovery,” he explains.
If the neuroscientist’s suspicions are correct, rats would join an exclusive group of great apes and corvids that are capable of seeing things from the perspective of another.
“I would not claim that we have proven this,” says Brecht. “The observations are very suggestive, however.” He believes that playing more hide-and-seek with rats might yet provide the proof either way. That would surely suit Brecht’s rats. Having been taught to play the game with their handlers, they are now busy playing it with each other. Stuart Blackman
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