Researchers from Purdue University in Indiana said they could train four pigs to perform a “joystick-driven video game task” to get treats.
The success rate of the pigs in the task was described by researchers as ‘remarkable and indicates their behavioral and cognitive flexibility’.
The animals – a pair of two-year-old Panepinto micro-pigs and two three-month-old Yorkshire pigs – were trained to manipulate a joystick to control a pointer on a computer monitor, researchers said in a study that Was published Thursday. .
The cursor can be used to hit three targets – of different problems – on the screen. When the target was hit, an automatic grain distributor released the food.
Prior to the experiment, scientists from the University’s Center for Animal Welfare Science trained the pigs until they learned the behavior, using voice commands, mocking joysticks, and handing out treats.
The animals had to approach a computer that had ‘walls’ – or thick blue digital lines – scattered around the screen.
They then had to pick one of the ‘walls’ with the cursor to get a treat. As the pigs’ accuracy improved, the number of “walls” decreased to two, and then to one, which became more difficult.
The Panepinto pigs, Ebony and Ivory, both performed well – 84% success rate – when presented with three-wall targets.
But there was a skill gap between the two pigs as the number of targets diminished, with Ivory hitting one-sided targets 76% of the time, compared to Ebony’s 34%.
Meanwhile, the pigs from Yorkshire, Hamlet and Omelet succeed in completing the task ‘above chance’ when presented with two walls or a single wall on the screen, but not with three walls.
The researchers determined that “above the chance” is more than the pigs’ targets could arbitrarily achieve.
The pigs participated in the experiment between three and four months.
‘Impressive learning abilities’
The authors of the article, Candace C. Croney, professor of animal behavior and wellness and director at the University’s Center for Animal Welfare Science, and Sarah T. Boysen, a senior researcher at the university, said the experiment suggests that the animals’ have an intelligent person. understanding of the task.
“Acquiring video tasks required conceptual understanding of the task, as well as skilled car performance,” they told the newspaper.
In an interview with CNN, Croney said she hopes the article will inspire further research into the cognitive abilities of pigs.
“It will be fun for people to realize how unique pigs are and how more spiritually sophisticated they can be than we have previously acknowledged,” she said.
She hoped that research would help people understand how they could better “enrich” the lives of the animals.
Christian Nawroth, who was not involved in the study and a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Farm Animal Biology in Germany, was told about the importance of the findings that the article shows ‘the impressive learning abilities of pigs’.
“We already know that pigs are good problem solvers, but the ability to use a joystick to navigate a cursor on a screen is definitely something that has not been on the list of any farm animal so far,” he said. told CNN. the task the pigs were given was ‘not easy to solve’.
“We still underestimate the cleverness of pigs and farm animals in general. As this path of research, the recognition of farm animals, is taking up steam, we are likely to see more research on more sophisticated learning and cognitive skills of farm animals. during the following years, “he added.
The results were published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.