Rats simply like playing games, I'm not surprised that they thought pressing the button is fun. But really this is a variant of the mirror test. These rats wer

Rats simply like playing games, I'm not surprised that they thought pressing the button is fun. But really this is a variant of the mirror test. These rats were freshly adopted and have probably never seen a mirror, and have no idea what they look like. If they were given a mirror for a while before running this experiment, we might see different behavior. I found a paper [0] suggesting that rats do recognize other rats in mirrors, still photos, and video, but the results aren't very strong. I think the theory is that their eyesight is pretty poor and they rely mostly on scent to identify other rats. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5849344/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5849344/