Scientists have taught how red-legged tortoises use touch screens in exchange for strawberries. Researchers teach turtles a few touchscreen basics to understand animal navigation techniques. The turtle not only mastered the task in exchange for strawberries, but the animals also transfer knowledge to settings in real life. Turtles, native to Central and South America, do not have a hippocampus, a region of learning, memory, and spatial orientation related to the brain, one of the research's chief investigators and a senior lecturer in animal cognition at the University of Lincoln, England, Anna. Wilkinson said. In contrast, red-legged turtles can rely on the brain, called the medial cortex, which has complex cognitive behavior and area of ​​the area associated with decision makers.
To understand how the turtle learns, the researcher's tests depend on how the implied reptiles are resolved. When Wilkinson and researchers treated turtles at the University of Vienna, the reptiles looked at them and approached them again. The four red-legged tortoises studied how quickly the touchscreen was used, Wilkinson said. "This is the speed with which the beautiful pigeons and mice are doing. I trained the dogs with a touch screen. I said the turtles are faster," Wilkinson said.
In the experiment, the turtle has a red triangle in the center of the touch screen. When the two blue circles flashed, they had to linger, whether on the right or left, to get the circle processed. All four turtles mastered the work of the touch screen, but the two eventually stopped cooperating. This may be because they are too small to reach the screen normally, Wilkinson said.
The remaining two turtles applied their knowledge in the next part of the experiment in real-life situations, Wilkinson said. The researchers placed them on a stage with two blue empty food bowls that looked like blue circles on the touch screen. Turtles went to the same side of the bowl because they were squatting on the screen at a young age.