Challenging Our Views of Cognition – New Johns Hopkins Test Reveals That Mice Think Like Babies

Behavior that is “surprisingly strategic” enhances our understanding of animal cognition.
Are mice clever enough to be strategic?

Kishore Kuchibhotla, a Johns Hopkins University neuroscientist who studies learning in humans and animals, and who has long worked with mice, wondered why rodents often performed poorly in tests when they knew how to perform well. With a simple experiment, and by acting as “a little bit of a mouse psychologist,” he and his team figured it out.

“It appears that a big part of this gap between knowledge and performance is that the animal is engaging in a form of exploration—what the animal is doing is very clever,” he said. “It’s hard to say animals are making hypotheses, but our view is that animals, like humans, can make hypotheses and they can test them and may use higher cognitive processes to do it.”