Snakes ARE affectionate

[sophiedufort]

Highlights from the article I read yesterday:

In the plethora of research over the past few decades on the cognitive capabilities of various species, lizards, turtles and snakes have been left in the back of the class. Few scientists bothered to peer into the reptile mind, and those who did were largely unimpressed.
“Reptiles don’t really have great press,” said Gordon M. Burghardt, a comparative psychologist at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. “Certainly in the past, people didn’t really think too much of their intelligence. They were thought of as instinct machines.” But now that is beginning to change, thanks to a growing interest in “coldblooded cognition” and recent studies revealing that reptile brains are not as primitive as we imagined. The research could not only redeem reptiles but also shed new light on cognitive evolution.
Scientists say that many early studies of reptile cognition, conducted in the 1950s and ’60s, had critical design flaws.
Now that scientists have gotten better at designing experiments for reptiles, they are uncovering all kinds of surprising abilities. Some of the most intriguing work involves social learning. The conventional wisdom is that because reptiles are largely solitary, asocial creatures, they are incapable of learning through observation.
The field of reptile cognition is in its infancy, but it already suggests that “intelligence” may be more widely distributed through the animal kingdom than had been imagined. As Dr. Burghardt put it, “People are starting to take some of the tests that were developed for the ‘smart’ animals and adapting them to use with other species, and finding that the ‘smart’ animals may not be so special.”