ANTONE MARTINHOA duckling enters the world primed to recognize its mother. Only she need not look like a duck, nor even necessarily a living animal. In a study published last week (July 14) in Science, researchers used this ability of ducklings to discover that they can recognize abstract traits—color and shape—as properties of their “mother.”
Researchers from University of Oxford, U.K., presented ducklings with a “mother” composed of two blocks, shaped as a combination of two cubes, prisms, or spheres. A bird might be given two green spheres to imprint on, for example. The researchers then took the blocks away. Finally, the scientists showed the duckling two new pairs of blocks, slowly circling a track, like two very short toy trains. For example, these might be a pair of matched blue spheres and a mismatched pair of orange and purple spheres. (See Science’s video.)
The Oxford scientists found that 70 percent of the ducklings tested peeped and dashed toward the matched pair (in this example, a pair of spheres that matched in color) as their abstract mother. If the original ...
