Ducklings are capable of understanding complex concepts such as same and different, which we typically think are beyond the cognitive capacity of animals. The study conducted by the zoologists Antone Martinho III and Alex Kacelnik at Oxford University suggests that some birds are smarter than we have realized.

In Martinho and Kalcelnik's experiment, the ducklings were exposed to a pair of small and brightly colored shapes that circled above their pens like objects on a mobile, for 24 hours after hatching. Some pairs had similar shapes while others had mismatched ones.

That was the priming period as what the researchers termed a same-different test. Then, they were exposed to two new pairs of objects, one with identical shapes while the other was different ones. Most of ducklings followed the pair of shapes with the same relationship as the pair with which they were primed.

The same principle was held when the researchers reversed alternated the colors of the two objects in the pairing rather than the shapes. The ducklings that had been primed with objects of the same color chose to follow a different one color pair later in the experiment, while those that had been primed to recognize a pair with two colors did the same.

The study relied on the ducklings' ability to imprint, one of the first things a naive brain learns to do, EurekAlert reported. It was then found that once the duckling imprints, it sticks with its mother steadfastly. However, the ducklings' behavior remains the same even when it imprints on another object aside from a duck.

The ducklings study suggested that they are able to identify not only shape and color, but also similarity and difference, the abstract concepts that require a broad understanding of the way things relate to one another. The fact that the objects were moving makes interpreting the relationships even more difficult, but the ducklings were still able to analyze them.

The ducklings' thought was interpreted by Martinho and Kacelnik by tossing them into an experiment the day they were born, US24 reported.

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