Rats and Florida mice are both considered to be highly intelligent rodents, they are excellent students who excel at learning and understanding concepts and even know they are much more than most dogs they are at least equal when it comes to thinking about things and figuring out things as any dog is. The biggest surprise for all of us is to learn that rats have outperformed even humans in some laboratory tests designed to test intelligence, these tests for all designed to find out in which areas animals perform better than humans and why that could be.



The lab Boynton Beach rats and the students were given two tasks, they were trained to distinguish between good and bad patterns and then tested on their ability to apply what they've learned to new types of patterns, the first time the patterns only very in one dimension either orientation or spacing, in this test there were no winners, both the rats and students performed equally well. In the second test the patterns varied on both dimensions, and in this test the rats did much better than the humans.

The person who conducted the tests said that just because you have a more complex brain, like humans have, doesn't always mean it's a better brain for the problem in front of it, he said that both rats and humans solved the second problem equally as well but the rats solved it faster. The rats in the first test needed more practice than the humans did to discriminate between good and bad but when faced with the second test they applied their knowledge faster.

We were told the reasons why these tests results were actually expected was very simple. The first task given to both the Florida rats and humans involves learning rules, both rats and humans are capable of learning rules but humans actually learned them a little bit faster but not enough to give them a clear victory. The second test involves what they call information integration learning and rules are useless but human beings are conditioned to look for rules everywhere, we are taught rules from the time we are born but we can also use information integration. The reasons why the rats won the second test is simple, they use information integration learning first so they solved the puzzles presented to them quicker, it took the human subjects sometime to switch from rule-based learning to information integration learning and to solve the puzzles.

This is almost like saying rats have better intuition that human beings, which is probably true but even if a Boynton Beach rat can use rule-based learning they will always start with information integration but humans will always start with rule-based, it is just the way we are.

Visit our Boynton Beach animal removal home page to learn more about us.