ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2020
Rats play tit-for-tat instead of integrating social experience over multiple interactions.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- A Novel Cooperative Behavior Assay in Rats Reveals Distinct Social Coordination Strategies of Increasing Complexity and Social Reciprocity Deficits in a Model of Fragile X Syndrome.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Experimental evidence for social learning in semi-natural, wild-type Norway rats.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Norway rats recruit cooperation partners based on previous receipt of help while disregarding kinship.iScience · 2024Article
- Long-term cooperative relationships among vampire bats are not strongly predicted by their initial interactions.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2024Article
- Through an animal's eye: the implications of diverse sensory systems in scientific experimentation.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Review
- In search of prosociality in rodents: A scoping review.PloS one · 2024Article
- Assessment of help value affects reciprocation in Norway rats.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- When deciding to cooperate by direct reciprocity, Norway rats sometimes benefit from olfactory competence and seem not impaired by insufficient cognitive abilities.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Apes reciprocate food positively and negatively.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Comparative economics: how studying other primates helps us better understand the evolution of our own economic decision making.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Game theory in biology: 50 years and onwards.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Evidence suggesting that reindeer mothers allonurse according to the direct reciprocity and generalized reciprocity decision rules.PloS one · 2023Article
- Motivations to reciprocate cooperation and punish defection are calibrated by estimates of how easily others can switch partners.PloS one · 2022Article
- Egg-trading worms start reciprocation with caution, respond with confidence and care about partners' quality.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- The smell of cooperation: rats increase helpful behaviour when receiving odour cues of a conspecific performing a cooperative task.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Pro-social preference in an automated operant two-choice reward task under different housing conditions: Exploratory studies on pro-social decision making.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2020Article
- The social life of Norway rats (eLife · 2020Review
- Reciprocity: Different behavioural strategies, cognitive mechanisms and psychological processes.Learning & behavior · 2019Review
Corrections and comments
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2 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Theoretical models of cooperation typically assume that agents use simple rules based on last encounters, such as 'tit-for-tat', to reciprocate help. By contrast, empiricists generally suppose that animals integrate multiple experiences over longer timespans. Here, we compared these two alternative hypotheses by exposing Norway rats to partners that cooperated on three consecutive days but failed to cooperate on the fourth day, and to partners that did the exact opposite. In additional controls, focal rats experienced cooperating and defecting partners only once. In a bar-pulling setup, focal rats based their decision to provide partners with food on last encounters instead of overall cooperation levels. To check whether this might be owing to a lack of memory capacity, we tested whether rats remember the outcome of encounters that had happened three days before. Cooperation was not diminished by the intermediate time interval. We conclude that rats reciprocate help mainly based on most recent encounters instead of integrating social experience over longer timespans.
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