Raccoons Pass Aesop's Fable Test By Upending It

[rl3]

>She climbed onto the cylinder and rocked it until it tipped over, giving her access to the sweet treat.

>“That was something we hadn’t predicted,” and indeed, had designed against, says study leader Lauren Stanton, a Ph.D. student at the University of Wyoming.

They should have consulted me for this experiment. Growing up in the suburbs, I have extensive experience in observing the little bastards topple or otherwise gain access to all manner of receptacle—no matter how seemingly impregnable—on inumerable occasions. Their cunning knows no bounds.

[KGIII]

Raccoons, black bears, and skunks are all smarter than many people seem to think. They can find their way into most anything in common use. There have been cars broken into by bears, for example.

[daemin]

To me that base did not seem like it was designed that way. If it had been the base would be much bigger in area so that far more force would have been required to tip it. Any structural engineers want to take a look?

[baddox]

It’s interesting that the test involves showing the animals how to use the rocks to raise the marshmallow. Not to insult any particular species, but that seems more like a test of the instinct to mimic behavior with some desirable outcome. I assumed the Aesop’s Fable test was testing for an apparent understand of water displacement and floating.

[SomewhatLikely]

I think that's why they also do the test with floating and sinking balls to see if they discard the lighter balls.

[naasking]

> Not to insult any particular species, but that seems more like a test of the instinct to mimic behavior with some desirable outcome. I assumed the Aesop’s Fable test was testing for an apparent understand of water displacement and floating.

How is that not understanding? They associate the outcome with a cause, and so realize how to trigger that cause themselves to achieve the outcome. What more is there to understanding?

[has2k1]

For this particular case, are you accusing the raccoons of just merely adapting positive outcome superstitions?

[sampl]

Reminds me of this guy who tried to build a cat-proof automatic feeder: http://quinndunki.com/blondihacks/?p=3023

[jaclaz]

Yep, discussed here (just in case):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13230904

[HeyLaughingBoy]

It's a she.

[diminish]

How can I stop autoplaying video? What I want is to:

- mute the sound - prevent autoplaying - prevent video download consume my internet quota.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

For Firefox: About:Config setting media.autoplay.enabled to false.

For Chrome: Chrome://flags set autoplay policy to "Document user activation is required".

I know that this breaks animated .gifs in Firefox, though you can get them to animate by viewing the image info (right-click menu). That's rarely a big loss anyway.

[sleepychu]

With uMatrix I was able to read the article without loading any of the external cruft, it does add some cognitive overhead to browsing sites with a lot of external dependencies

[rjbwork]

Wow, NatGeo's site is terrible right now. Full screen unskippable autoplaying video that starts off unmuted. It then had at least one of the same type that was unmuted on the actual page, so upon page load it just sounded like a total cacophony of videos. Totally unusable site.

[executesorder66]

I got none of that with uBlock Origin. You should try it.