Rats and other animals need to be highly attuned to social signals from others so that can identify friends to cooperate with and enemies to avoid. To find out if this extends to non-living beings, Loleh Quinn at the University of California, San Diego, and her colleagues tested whether rats can detect social signals form robotic rats.

They housed eight adult rats with two types of robotic rat -- one social and one asocial -- for four days. The robots rats were quite minimalist, resembling a chunkier version of a computer mouse with wheels -- to move around and colorful markings.

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