| ▲ | godelski 2 days ago | |
They missed a real opportunity for "Omelette Doom Fromage" there But yeah, I'd wager too subtle. I'm also questioning now how much rats use smell for navigating their environments. I notice that my cat is a lot more smell oriented than I initially thought and I think it makes a big difference. Hard to tell though. | ||
| ▲ | sdenton4 21 hours ago | parent [-] | |
Humans are /extremely/ visual compared to other animals: this tends to make us underestimate the intelligence of other animals (when we use visual intelligence as a proxy for general intelligence) and miss out on smart uses of other senses entirely. Rats are well-known for thwarting maze studies using things like fine sensitivity to slope, directional orientation using smell gradients across a room, or detecting the direction of researchers outside the maze based on micro-vibrations. (Good book on the general topic of measuring animal intelligence: "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?" by Frans de Waal) | ||