Kind: captions
Language: en
you're about to witness a groundbreaking
yet oddly adorable psychological
experiment this cuttlefish after days of
training will succeed in a test of
Temptation originally designed for
humans challenging our understanding of
the origins of
intelligence which is surprising because
cuttlefish are widely different from
humans they live relatively solitary
lives they have three hearts they have a
beak like a Parrot uh they also have
little muscles that can extend to make
their skin look bumpy it can change
texture and color within the blink of an
eye but to survive cuddlefish seem to
need one more trick Mind Over
[Music]
Matter this child is taking part in a
now famous similarly adorable
experiment in the Stanford marshmallow
experiment preschool age kids are given
a single marshmallow they're told they
can eat it immediately or they could
wait 15 minutes for the experimented to
return if they're able to resist
temptation for 15 minutes they would get
a second marshmallow TV shows and
parents have tried the marshmallow
experiment on different kinds of kids
just to see all the cuteness that
happens when a kid is trying to resist a
marshmallow many people have recreated
this experiment posting adorable vide
vide of kids displaying specific
interesting
behaviors often the children who were
able to do the best in the marshmallow
experiment are the ones who can distract
themselves away from that marshmallow so
often they'll look away or close their
eyes or sing a little song to themselves
or even pretend that that marshmallow is
something else delayed gratification is
the ability to resist the temptation of
an immediate pleasure in the service of
a long-term more valuable reward so the
ability to delay gratification uh
usually starts to develop around 3 or 4
years of age and by five usually most
kids are pretty good at this this
experiment has been adapted to look for
self-control in animals one really
important way we try to understand the
evolution of cognition including the
origins of human cognition is by looking
out into the natural world and trying to
see how other animals think and solve
problems we tested delay of
gratification in primates by giving them
a decision between a smaller amount of
food they could have right now and a
larger amount of food that they had to
wait some delay to receive we found that
chimpanzees were willing to wait about 2
minutes in order to get four extra
grapes up until recently Advanced
self-control like this had only been
observed in Social species such as Apes
crows and
parrots the social intelligence
hypothesis proposes that more complex
cognition evolves in response to social
pressures because animals need to
constantly outwit others or cooperate
with others in order to be successful
one important component onent of
intelligence is self-control especially
when it comes to being social but if
cuttlefish who are solitary have
self-control then there may be a
different or perhaps second nonsocial
origin to self-control and
intelligence here at the Marine
biological laboratory in
Massachusetts Alex
Schnell Roger hanlin and their
colleagues devis a way to adapt the
marshmallow test for cuttlefish in this
experiment we wanted to test whether the
Cuttlefish could wait for a preferred
prey item over a less preferred prey
item so the first step of the experiment
is to determine the prey preferences of
each cuttlefish we offer the Cuttlefish
two different types of prey live prey
and non-live prey these cuttlefish are
usually fed prefrozen shrimp
[Music]
but cuddlefish are very visual Predators
so more often than not they prefer live
prey over non-live
prey since scientists haven't quite
figured out how to set these tentacle
test subjects down to describe the rules
of the experiment the researchers
created a system of underwater Chambers
to get the idea across we present a
cuttlefish with a chamber marked with a
circle first we lower the chamber into
the tank with the Cuttlefish we drop
some food in
there and then as the Cuttlefish
approaches the chamber we open the door
immediately so the Cuttlefish can access
the food
[Music]
inside we then present the cuttlefish
with a chamber marked with a triangle we
lower this chamber into the tank
drop some food inside but this time when
the Cuttlefish approaches the door
doesn't open the Cuttlefish usually
responds by attacking the chamber with
its feeding
tentacles but the door won't open for
several seconds for up to a few
[Music]
minutes finally when the door opens the
cuddlefish strikes the prey inside
shooting out its feeding tentacles
[Music]
after a few days the Cuttlefish learns
that the chamber with the circle means
that the prey within can be accessed
immediately whereas the chamber with the
triangle can only be accessed after a
delay the next step is to train the
Cuttlefish to learn that the choice
between the two food items is mutually
exclusive it can only take one prey item
the other one will be removed we lower
both Chambers inside the tank but this
time they are not marked with any visual
shapes we drop the same pray items
inside each chamber when the Cuttlefish
approaches one chamber to access the
food inside the food in the other
chamber is immediately
removed so the Cuttlefish quickly learns
that it can only eat one of the prey
atoms inside one chamber now we can move
on to the final phase of the experiment
where we test for self-control in the
Cuttlefish we insert both Chambers into
the Cuttlefish tank one marked with a
circle and one marked with the triangle
remember the circles associated with
food that's accessible immediately while
the triangle signifies food that the
Cuttlefish needs to wait for in the
chamber with the circle we drop non-live
prey Which is less preferable and in the
chamber with the triangle we drop live
prey which is more
preferable the Cuttlefish is now faced
with a difficult decision it can access
the less referable non-live prey in the
circle chamber
immediately or it can wait for the door
to open in the delay chamber so it can
access the preferable prey even as the
door to the shrimp opens the cuddlefish
awaits it seems to have learned that if
it goes for the non-live shrimp then its
preferred food the live crawfish will be
removed this is a challenging decision
so the Cuttlefish tries to distract
Itself by looking away from the prey
that's immediately available which is
reminiscent of of some of the children's
behavior in the marshmallow
experiment after a minute the door
finally opens to the delay chamber and
the Cuttlefish that's been waiting very
patiently can finally access its reward
inside this is the first time that we've
seen Advanced self-control in an
invertebrate species in a species that
isn't long lived and isn't social it's
really exciting that an animal like a
cuttlefish can succeed in such a problem
this tells us that you don't need to be
living in a complex social environment
in order to evolve this particular
[Music]
skill so in this hypothesis animals
evolve more complex cognition because of
the difficulties of finding food in
their natural
environments as for why cuttlefish may
have developed this intelligent Behavior
Alex Schnell has a hypothesis cuttlefish
stay camouflage from the majority of the
time but in order to pursue food they
need to break camouflage which exposes
them to predators
this is crucial to their survival since
unlike other mollusks like clams they
have no outer shell to protect them from
predators cuttlefish might have evolved
self-control in order to optimize their
predatory excursions to attack their
prey at the right time and to limit
their exposure to predators in the wild
something like a non-live shrimp may not
be valuable enough to take the risk
whereas a live crayfish would be so this
could be evolutionary advantage just for
the Cuttlefish what this kind of work
tells us is that we can look out into
the natural world to creatures that look
so different from us with different
kinds of brains and different kinds of
Lifestyles and still see these same
glimmers of
intelligence and that brings us to other
questions about whether we could find
self-control in other non-social
animals because these cuttlefish have
shown that you don't need to be social
to develop agency or willpower you just
need to be a picky risk averse
those qualities may even be part of why
we and other vertebrates all of whom
forage and try to avoid Predators have
self-control the ability to hold off on
what's in front of us and save room for
dessert
[Music]