Hannah Griebling

They solve one of them, get a food reward out, then you lock that solution that they've learned to solve.

And that essentially is like asking them like, okay, you can't solve this one now.

What are you going to do?

Are you able to innovate again and open another solution on the puzzle box?

Yes, definitely.

Definitely.

So we already knew that about raccoons.

So what we asked with this study was a pretty simple question.

Is that what happens if we just don't lock any of the solutions on the puzzle boxes?

So we gave them a puzzle box.

So we had nine total solutions, but they only got three at a time.

And we had nine because we had three easy solutions, three medium level solutions, and then three hard solutions or what we thought would be hard for them to solve.

And I put the box in with them.

This was done with captive raccoons.

And I left it there for 20 minutes.

It had one marshmallow inside, but three access points, essentially.

And when I came back, I was actually surprised that they had opened all three solutions on the puzzle box within that 20 minutes.

And so that was something that we found most of the raccoons in the study did.

I think it was only one individual that only opened.

just one solution at the medium level, but still opened multiple solutions at the easy and hard.