Raccoons want to solve puzzles just for fun

Raccoons want to solve puzzles just for fun

By Meghan Bartels edited by Andrea Thompson

For a raccoon, breaking into the trash can be just as satisfying as cracking a crossword puzzle or a Sudoku is for you, according to new research.

These meddling “garbage pandas” have dexterous paws and considerable brainpower that have helped them thrive in a human-dominated world—even showing early signs of domestication—constantly thwarting attempts to stop them from rummaging through trash cans for tasty treats. “Raccoons have very dense brains, and that probably explains their increased ability to solve problems and be behaviorally flexible,” says Lauren Stanton, a cognitive ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

But new research published in Animal behavior suggests raccoons will try to solve problems even when they do not expect a food reward for the work. The researchers describe the behavior as searching for information, rather than food, in preparation for facing future challenges.

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The study was based on what the researchers call a multi-access puzzle box, a clear plastic box that has multiple doors and windows — sometimes equipped with locks and latches of varying degrees of difficulty — that an animal must open to get a treat inside. (The researchers let the raccoons they worked with in captivity choose between marshmallows, sardines, and dates dipped in sardine juice as rewards; marshmallows were by far the most popular choice.)

Typically, researchers give the puzzle, see what solution the animal finds and then give them the box again, this time with the first solution disabled. They want to see if the animal will find a new way to access its treat. In the new study, the researchers turned this formula on its head and gave the raccoons the unmodified (but refilled) box for several trials to see what the raccoons did.

“Going into it, I expected that they’d open a fix, they’d get the marshmallow out, and then they’d leave the box alone, and then, when I give it back to them the next time with another marshmallow, they might want to open another fix,” says study co-author Hannah Griebling, a Ph.D. candidate in cognitive ecology at the University of British Columbia.

But the raccoons went above and beyond, peering into the alternative solutions practically as soon as they had designated their marshmallow, without waiting for a refill. The continued investigations became less common as the solutions to the puzzle box became more complex, but they never stopped completely.

Griebling and her colleagues call the further work on the puzzle boxes “information trials” — essentially suggesting that the raccoons are taking advantage of the opportunity to investigate the additional entry mechanisms in case they find themselves in the same situation in the future.

Of course, “we can’t know what they’re thinking; we can only measure their behavior,” says Griebling. But the finding is striking evidence that something other than their taste for marshmallows is driving the animals’ continued exploration—and that it may not be so different from the kind of curiosity and satisfaction humans experience when solving problems like masquerades. “We think there may be some sort of intrinsic motivation for that behavior,” says Griebling.

Both Griebling and Stanton note that it would be valuable to repeat the work with wild raccoons, which may be more attuned to the risk of wasting time fiddling with a lock they can’t figure out how to open. (Stanton has worked with the researchers before, but was not involved in this experiment.)

And many people would appreciate a better understanding of how to convince trash pandas that a puzzle isn’t worth investigating anymore. If you’re one of them, Griebling’s advice is simple: “Really making sure they can’t get into something, rather than potentially giving them more challenges to solve, is probably important.”

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