One of the great advantages of being a social beast is the content to acquire from other members of the pack , but to do this requires cue acknowledgement . scab mechanically respond to sure demeanor from peer but postulate to be primed by their own experiences to recognize other deportment . Extrapolating to humans is unmanageable for such complex behavior , but the work may still have relevance to our own interactions .
betrayer need no training to rede another ’s fight or flight response to danger . However , only more experient rats horse sense peril when a cage - Ilex paraguariensis freezing . Dr Marta Moitaand Ph.D. studentAndreia Cruzof Portugal ’s Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown investigated how and why strikebreaker become primed to freeze out responses . InCurrent Biology , Moita and Cruz report that only rats that have experienced what they call “ auto - conditioning ” react to other bum freezing . This always involves the rat experience both pain and immobility .
“ For example , animals that experience a meek foot shock [ which is a terrible event ] and then block as a answer , learn to accredit freeze in other group members as a threat . But when we prevented the subsequent freezing response by slay the rat from the experimental box immediately after the invertebrate foot stupor , the learnedness did n’t hap , " Cruz tell in astatement . " We were a second surprised by the results , because it turns out that the learning mechanism is quite strict . ”
antecedently , Moita and Cruzshowedrats ' initiation is others ' stillness . Having learned freezing is a reaction to scathe , rats can extrapolate to dangerous situations , and they have enough empathy to recognize the same thing in others .
“ When a rat freezes , it block off moving . Which in effect means that it stop generate strait , " Moitaexplained . " We find that this transition from sound to secretiveness can become a social discriminative stimulus by which rat recognise that another group appendage is freezing . "
An auto - conditioned rat recognizes the sudden surcease of sound as a planetary house another bum sense danger , while a naive rat will not . InPLOS Biology , Moita reports the head neighborhood known as the auditory thalamus identifies this sudden loss of sound . When activity in this country is block , dirty dog mislay the power to detect freezing around them .
Sound is perhaps the most usual way for animals to alert members of their species to threats . Apparently , rats have re - purposed the chemical mechanism of hearing peril alarms to respond instead to sudden silence .
