Have you heard the one about the rat who got lost? Probably not, because rats don't need to ask directions. Jokes aside, it is well-established in scientific research circles that rats have an amazing sense of direction — possibly better than humans. In new neuroscience research from Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, authored by Thomas Doublet, Mona Nosrati and Clifford G. Kentros, the research team studied the way that adolescent lab rats navigated. They found that these teenage rats had surprising intuition when it came to navigation: the rats did not need to actually physically explore an environment themselves in order to pick up crucial information about a specific location and how to navigate that space. Rather, they were able to intuit such information in other ways, akin to how a human might read a map in order to create a mental map of a space prior to physically experiencing it.
The Trondheim, Norway-based study at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology found "observer" rats were able to figure out the navigational challenge by watching another rat, called "demonstrator" rats, in the study. These observer rats were then able to successfully demonstrate their navigational knowledge, typically completing the maze challenge at nearly 100% during their first trial. In other words, they were watching and learning navigational skills by observing their rat colleagues.
