Los Angeles Times

Scientists taught rats to play hide and seek

Ready or not, here they come: Scientists who played hide and seek with rats found that their furry subjects seemed to love the game - and they were remarkably good at it.

The unconventional experiment, described in Friday's edition of the journal Science, sheds light on the sophisticated sense of play in these tiny rodents and the complex mechanisms at work in their brains. It also hints at the evolutionary usefulness of this type of play.

"I thought it was a major scientific contribution to the field," said Jeffrey Burgdorf, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University who was not involved in the study.

In recent decades, scientists have begun to explore the neural, behavioral and evolutionary underpinnings of play.

Play is confusing because it's done

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