BABY DUCKS BEAT BABY HUMANS!

ABSTRACT THINKERS & QUACKERS

Baby ducks can think like humans! New research has found that newly hatched ducklings are capable of abstract thought within their first day of life!

Abstract thinking is higher level thinking. Up until now, it was believed that only humans, and just a few other birds, like parrots and crows, could do, and even then, only after considerable training. But ducklings get it without any training at all. And that’s remarkable.

Antone Martinho III and Alex Kacelnik, researchers from the University of Oxford, created a behavioral test to study the way ducks learn to navigate their world through abstract thought. They found that ducklings can figure out relationships immediately, and that they can discern whether something is the same or it is different.  Their findings were published in the journal Science.

“This is a learning process by which a newly-hatched precocious bird learns who its mother is,” said Martinho. “They hatch, they spend a few hours drying off and then this imprinting kicks in. It has a sensitive period of just a few days and they can learn to follow a moving [object] in just a few minutes while they are in that sensitive period.”

Learning who your mama is is a skill critically important to survival.

While some abstract art looks simplistic, abstract thinking is quite sophisticated. Those who excel in abstract thought, tend to rise above the rest, whether they are artists, scientists, mathematicians, or politicians. If you can see beyond the concrete, if you can understand relationships between the seemingly disparate, you can solve problems and create new ideas better than those who can’t. You might even be a genius. But ducklings have you beat!

“[The skill] would mean having the flexibility to recognise that a duck that is in the water, further away than normal and at an angle that you have never seen before is still mum, even though that exact image is not one you have seen as mum before,” said Martinho.

In the first experiment, one group of ducklings was exposed pairs of objects that were the same shape while the other group was exposed to pairs of objects with different shapes. After 25 minutes the ducklings were removed, put in the dark for 30 minutes, and then exposed to a new scenario with two new pairings, one with matching and one with mismatched shapes.

The ducklings had to recognize a concept that only exists as a relationship between two other objects, which is a very abstract task. Most of the ducklings followed the pair that was similar to what they saw at the beginning of the experiment.

“If they were exposed to a pair that was the same, then when they were exposed to new objects that they had never seen before they still preferred pairs that were the same,” said Martinho.

In the second experiment, two new groups of freshly-hatched ducklings similarly tested, however now, one group was exposed to a pair of spheres that were the same color, while the other group was exposed to a pair of spheres with different colors. These ducks passed the abstract thinking test with flying colors!

“It tells us that ducklings are able to learn and deploy abstract relational concepts, which is not something we expect,” said Martinho. “They need a table of rules or concepts that lets them identify something that doesn’t look exactly like it did last time they saw it - as with mother duck walking halfway behind a tree,” he says. “She doesn’t physically look the same way that she did last time [the duckling] saw her, but because [the duckling] has an abstract understanding of what defines [its] mother duck, it is able to say ‘that’s her.’”

“And because imprinting happens so quickly, the ducklings learned to discriminate relational concepts much faster than other species, and with a similar level of precision,” said Kacelnik.

Martinho points out, “This ability for abstraction is probably more necessary to animal life in general than we thought.” It’s probably more important for human life as well. Think about it!

Read more about Beautiful Abstract in Earth As Abstract Artist, Emotions Are Abstract Art,  The Heart & Soul of Beautiful Abstracts and 10 Most Beautiful Abstract Sculptures.

And check out more beautiful things happening now in BN Mind/Body, Soul/Impact, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Arts/Design, and Place/Time, Daily Fix posts.

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IMAGE CREDITS:

1. Image: by Raul Lieberwirth Little Bird Courage
2. Image: cuatrok77. “canon.”
3. Image: by Laura Wolf. “Bro cuddles.”
4. Image: by Viv. “Too Gorgeous.”
5. Image: by Will George. “Birds of a feather.”
6. Image: by Tambako The Jaguar. “Lying duckling.”
7. Image: by Yves Merckx J'ai faim!
8. Image: by canhasal. “Momma Duck and Her Ducklings.”
9. Image: by Bruce Irschick. “Beautiful Duckling.”
10. Image: by Joelle Johnson. “Three ducks in a row.”
11. Image: by Cowgirl Jules Duckling
12. Image: by teresaphillips1965. “Baby Duck.”