The unappreciated brilliance of rats
by Brandon Keim
Able to survive and even thrive in the most heavily urbanized places, rats are celebrated—or at least begrudgingly acknowledged—for their extraordinary resilience. Yet as underscored by a series of new studies, they’re not just fast-breeding and tough. They’re smart.
The first of these studies, published in the journal Current Biology and led by Indiana University neuroscientists Danielle Panoz-Brown and Jonathon Crystal, describes rats’ unexpectedly rich powers of episodic memory. That rats should be able to recall the what, where, and when of events isn’t a new notion—but it was generally considered limited to a few memories. As Panoz-Brown and Crystal showed in tests of whether rats could differentiate between combinations of odors and visual patterns, they could recall dozens and could distinguish between contexts in which they’d previously encountered odors. “Our findings suggest that rats remember multiple unique events and the contexts in which these events occurred,” they wrote.
The next study involved the ability of rats to detect prosody, or patterns of intonation and rhythm that are fundamental to human language. As described in Animal Cognition by cognitive scientists Juan M. Toro of Spain’s Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies and the University of Vienna’s Marisa Hoeschele, rats can discriminate between words pronounced in different ways. To be clear, the rats didn’t understand language—they were tested with nonsense words—but they do “have at least some of the prerequisite abilities humans use to analyze spoken language when they first encounter it,” wrote Toro and Hoeschele.
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http://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2016/10/unappreciated-brilliance-rats/