Would you help a trapped robot? Some rats would. The rodents can form social bonds with robots and will even help rescue a robotic rat that’s trapped in a cage.
Animals, including rats, need to be highly attuned to social signals from others so they can identify friends to cooperate with and enemies to avoid. To find out if this extends to non-living beings, at the University of California, San Diego and her colleagues tested whether rats can detect social signals from robotic rats.
They housed eight adult rats with two types of robotic rat – one social and one asocial – for four days. During this time, the social robot rat followed the living rats around, played with the same toys, and opened cage doors to let them escape (see video). Meanwhile, the asocial robot rat simply moved forwards and backwards and side to side.
Advertisement
Next, the researchers trapped the robot rats in cages and gave the living rats the opportunity to release them by pressing a lever. Across 18 trials each, the living rats showed a preference for freeing the social robot, releasing it 30 per cent of the time, compared to 19 per cent for the asocial robot.
This suggests that the living rats perceived the social robot as a genuine social being, says Quinn. This may be because it displayed typical social rat behaviours like communal exploring and playing. The reason they helped it escape may be because they remembered it freeing them earlier and wanted to return the favour, she says.
[video_player id=”9pvIqL93″ access_level=”subscriber”]
“Rats have been shown to engage in multiple forms of reciprocal help and cooperation including what is referred to as direct reciprocity – where a rat will help another rat that has previously helped them,” says Quinn.
The readiness of the rats to befriend the social robot was surprising given its minimal design, says at the University of Queensland in Australia, who helped with the research. The robot was the same size as a regular rat but resembled a simple plastic box on wheels. “We’d assumed we’d have to give it a moving head and tail, facial features, and put a scent on it to make it smell like a real rat, but that wasn’t necessary,” says Wiles.
The finding shows how sensitive rats are to social cues, even when they come from basic robots, says Wiles. Similarly, children tend to treat robots as if they are fellow beings, even when they display only simple social signals, she says. “We humans seem to be fascinated by robots, and it turns out other animals are too.”
Animal Behavior and Cognition
