Rats Are Smarter Than We Think

Although both human and nonhuman animals may use basic associative mechanisms to learn about causal relations, humans have a deeper understanding of causal relations that cannot be reduced to associative learning. In contrast, there is no definite proof that animals, including nonhuman primates, possess deep causal understanding. Blaisdell et al. (p. 1020) present evidence that rats can reason about the effects of their causal interventions. Rats correctly predicted that interventions on one effect of a common-cause model would not affect the other effect. Thus, rats can engage in more sophisticated causal reasoning than predicted by associative models.

Science 17 February 2006:Vol. 311. no. 5763, pp. 1020 - 1022DOI: 10.1126/science.1121872
Causal Reasoning in Rats
Empirical research with nonhuman primates appears to support the view that causal reasoning is a key cognitive faculty that divides humans from animals. The claim is that animals approximate causal learning using associative processes. The present results cast doubt on that conclusion. Rats made causal inferences in a basic task that taps into core features of causal reasoning without requiring complex physical knowledge. They derived predictions of the outcomes of interventions after passive observational learning of different kinds of causal models. These competencies cannot be explained by current associative theories but are consistent with causal Bayes net theories.