July 02, 2007

rats demonstrate generosity

From nature.com, news that rats demonstrate generosity to one another:

Another strategy, called ‘generalized reciprocity’, is for an animal to assume that its most recent interaction with any other individual is representative of how the whole community usually behaves. In that case, an animal only has to remember its last experience. “It’s a simpler mechanism and therefore more likely to be evolutionarily important,” says Taborsky.