Behavioral and neural correlates of hide-and-seek in rats

Abstract

Role play between rats and humans There is controversy regarding how widespread animal play behavior is and what its evolutionary function might be. Reinhold et al. demonstrated that rats can play hide-and-seek with a human. In the “seek” condition, rats learned to look for the hidden humans and kept seeking until they found them. In the “hide” condition, they learned to hide in one of several locations and waited there until being found. In both cases, the rats were rewarded by social interaction with the human. Rats vocalized when seeking and finding and were silent when hiding. Recordings in the medial prefrontal cortex detected neurons that were sensitive to the game structure. Science , this issue p. 1180