Social rats trade chocolate for cagemates | COSMOS...

Social rats trade chocolate for cagemates | COSMOS magazine

The presence of a rat trapped in a restrainer elicits focused activity from his cagemate, leading eventually to door-opening and consequent liberation of the trapped rat.

LONDON: Rats will choose to liberate a trapped companion even when offered a reward of chocolate as an alternative, report researchers.

Mice and rats are known to show ‘emotional contagion’ towards their fellows, in that they can detect and mimic each others emotional state, but actively helping other rodents requires an extra empathic step.

“We wanted to see if rats would go beyond emotional contagion to actively help another rat in distress,” said co-author Peggy Mason, also from the University of Chicago.

“This is really asking quite a bit of a rat as active helping requires that the helper rat do more than freeze in fear and distress. The helper rat has to down-regulate the fear experienced through emotional contagion. In other words, the helper has to suppress the natural response of frozen immobility and actually move and act to help the other rat.”

Instead of opening the food containing restrainer and eating all the food themselves, the free rats not only freed the trapped rat, but in most instances also shared the chocolate with them. “Truly amazing from a rat perspective,” remarked Mason. “Imagine a rat seeing food and not eating it!”

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