Ducklings are much smarter than you think, study finds

Researchers from the University of Oxford revealed ducklings can understand the concepts of ‘same’ and ‘different’, a capability only observed in intelligent animals like primates, crows, and parrots.

Young animals typically learn to identify and follow their mother through a kind of learning known as imprinting, which can take place in less than 15 minutes after hatching. Imprinting is a potent kind of learning that helps ducklings to follow any moving object, provided they see it inside the ‘sensitive period’ for imprinting.

Imprinting on a Strange Object

In this new study, published in the journal Science, hatchlings were shown a pair of items moving in a circular path that were either the same as or different from each other, in form or in color. This was designed to ‘imprint’ these pairs of moving items on the ducks. Check it out:

In subsequent tests, each duckling was given the choice to follow one of two pairs of items that had not already seen. So, if a duckling had originally been subjected to a pair of spherical items, in the test it may have had to choose between a pair of pyramids (same) or a pair comprised of one cube and one cuboid (different).

If the birds had learned the connection between items in the original pair, then they should have tracked the novel pairs showing that same connection (either ‘same’ or ‘different’), regardless of whether they had seen the test items. Therefore, ducklings that had been imprinted on two spheres should have tracked the set of two pyramids, because they were the same. This is exactly what the researchers observed.

Around three-quarters of the ducklings chose to follow the stimulus pair, indicating they had learned the connection in imprinting. The consistency was as good if they had to learn the idea of equal or unequal, or if they were tested with shapes or colors.

“To our knowledge this is the first demonstration of a non-human organism learning to discriminate between abstract relational concepts without any reinforcement training,” Alex Kacelnik, a zoology professor at Oxford University, said in a statement to redOrbit. “The other animals that have demonstrated this ability have all done so by being repeatedly rewarded for correct performance, while our ducklings did it spontaneously, thanks to their predisposition to imprint when very young.

The researchers said their finding indicates this type of learning may not be as rare or as difficult as previously thought.

“’It may mean that relational concepts are adaptively useful or even necessary to a wider variety of animal,” Kacelnik said. “Most animals will, like the ducklings, need identification mechanisms that are robust to natural variation. A challenge we face now is to identify the processes by which the animals’ brains achieve it.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

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