The four pigs came to win. When they played the game right, they got delicious dog food (they used to get M & M’s, but people decided they were too sugary). Time and again, when researchers are asked to complete a video game task – steering a cursor with a joystick, sort of a rudimentary Pong– they did it with impressive skill.
Researchers started with pupigs tap on automated tasks in the late 1990s, and although the results occasionally appeared in the press over the years, there is no peer-reviewed research into the experiments published until today, right away paper in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. The scientists found that despite convenient and visual limitations for the animals, pigs were able to both understand and perform goals simple computer games.
“What they could do is go far beyond the odds of meeting these goals,” Candace Croney, director of Purdue University’s Center for Animal Welfare Science and lead author of the paper, said in a phone call. “And well enough above the odds that it’s very clear they had some conceptual understanding of what they were asked to do.”
The published research is the long-awaited fruit of some twenty years of work that began when Croney worked at Purdue University with prolific pig researcher Stanley Curtis. The project followed the efforts of two Yorkshire pigs, Hamlet and Omelet, and two Panepinto micro pigs, Ebony and Ivory, as they attempted to move a cursor to an illuminated area on the computer screen.
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“They’re begging to play video games,” Curtis told the AP in 1997. “They beg to be the first to get out of their lofts, and then they run up the slope to play.”
It was a tough battle for the pigs. The joysticks were equipped for primate trials, so the hoofed pigs had to use their snouts and mouths to get the job done. All four pigs were found to be farsighted, so the screens had to be placed at an optimal distance so that the pigs could see the targets. There were additional restrictions on the Yorkshire pigs. Bred to grow quickly, the heavier pigs couldn’t stay on their feet for too long.
“While there may have been some physical limitations to how well the pigs could see the screen or manipulate the joystick, they clearly understood the connection between their own behavior, the joystick, and what was happening on the screen,” said Lori Marino, a neuroscientist not affiliated with the current newspaper, said in an email. Marino, who leads the Whale Sanctuary Project, has long researched the cognition, intelligence and self-awareness of mammals, including pigs. “It really is a testament to their cognitive flexibility and ingenuity that they have found ways to manipulate the joystick, despite the fact that the test setup was often physically difficult for them.”
“What makes these findings even more important is that the pigs in this study showed self-confidence,” Marino added, “which is the ability to recognize that one’s own actions make a difference.”
The pigs were taught a number of commands to make their lives, as well as that of the researchers, easier. They learned clues similar to what you would teach a dog – sit, come, wait at their cages if they needed cleaning – and also to get their toys when the video game work was over.
“At some point they got really good at getting their toys and not so good at cleaning up on themselves,” Croney said. “I became more or less a pig shelter worker, went around and sorted them. So then we started teaching them to put things back. “
When the investigation was completed, the Yorkshire pigs were adopted by the owners of one bed and breakfast, where they spent their life on the farm. Ebony and ivory eventually retired to a petting zoo. Crone of them said that even years after the experiments, she went to visit Hamlet, who heard her voice and “galloped” across the meadow to say hello.
Pigs may not have the nimble fingers of a primate or the sad look of a puppy dog, but they compete cognitively. Winston Churchill once said, “Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you. Give me a pig! He looks you in the eye and treats you like an equal. “It has been a long time since we gave pigs the respect they deserve.