Rats Love To Play Hide And Seek, Scientists Find

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  It is well-known that rats are intelligent creatures. Sometimes, they're even smarter than people. So when neuroscientist Michael Brecht from Humboldt University of Berlin watched videos of rat owners putting their pets through mazes and playing games with them, he had an idea. Brecht wanted to know whether rats could be taught to play a game with rules. 

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  Brecht and 30 colleagues set up a 323 square foot room with cardboard and plastic boxes and shelters, with seven hiding places for the rats and three for the game master, neuroscientist Annika Stefanie Reinhold. After the rats had lived inside the room for a while, they were ready to play. 

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  Every game of hide and seek began with the rats inside a sealed box. When the rat was the seeker, the game master Reinhold would hide and open the box via remote control. Once trained, the rat knew to jump out of the box and look for Reinhold. When it found her, it was rewarded by tickling (which rats love). No food was involved. 

  When the rat was the hider, Reinhold would leave the box open and sit near it while the rat went to find a hiding place. After two weeks of training, five out of the six adolescent male rats involved in the study had learned how to play both roles of the game, and not to switch between them in the middle of a 'hiding' or 'seeking' role. 

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  Although this may seem trivial, as any young child can learn to play hide and seek, this behavior is actually very complex. The rats have to assume different roles, follow rules and strategize about where to hide, Brecht said. 

  He and his colleagues recorded the electrical signals from 180 neurons in a region involved in learning in the rats brains called the prefrontal cortex. About one third of the cells fired intensely when Reinhold put the rats into the box - the moment when the rats would know whether it would be seeking or hiding. This suggests that this region of the rats brains is sensitive to learning the rules of a game. 

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  What's even more interesting is that the rats actually enjoyed playing the game. The scientists deducted this by observing the rats' "joy jumps" when they found the hiding researcher (rabbits, lambs, guinea pigs and cows also jump when they're happy). Additionally, after being found, the rats would often scurry away to play the next game before getting their 'reward' of being tickled, suggesting that they weren't just playing for the reward, but because they liked it. 

  So whats the significance of this study? In a nutshell, it shows that rats (and other animals) are capable of much more complex processes than previously thought. And this could have important implications for animals - and humans - in the future. 

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