A sweet reward influences ants’ decision-making when they encounter ambiguous situations, hinting that they might have internal states like our emotions
Life
11 November 2022
Ants were given drops of sugar solution or bitter quinine solution in laboratory tests Julia Giehr
Ants appear to be optimistic when making decisions based on ambiguous information, and their positive bent is even stronger if they’ve just had a sweet reward.
This could be a sign that these animals experience something like our emotions, says Tomer Czaczkes at the University of Regensburg in Germany. “There is no good reason to rule out emotions in invertebrates out of hand, and indeed good reasons to think carefully about this,” he says.
An earlier …
source: newscientist.com