Despite the fact that Emma is blind, she deftly navigates this agility course with the guidance of her owner’s fingers.

Rats placed in situations replicating the prisoner’s dilemma, a common challenge of game theory, have been found to change their behavior based on prior experience.  In a recent study, two rats were placed in situations where if both independently chose to cooperate they would receive a modest reward but where if one defected while the other cooperated, the traitor received a large reward while the betrayed cooperator had his tail pinched.  If both rats chose to selfishly defect they both had their tails pinched.  In this situation, if one rat was forced to play a tit-for-tat strategy, the other rat quickly stopped his own traitorous behavior after a few trials and began cooperating to stop the other rat from defecting.

[PLoS ONE] via [Boing Boing] & [TheScientist], [image]