In today’s experiment, we take a look at the octopus’s ability to understand that an object is still there even when it is out of sight. Object permanence. We do this by providing Dennis, our octopus, with a fun little exercise. We show our octopus a delicious snack, and then hide it under one of the three cups. If he’s still interested in locating the snack once it’s hidden, it’s a good sign that he is aware that the fish is still there. Following the cup that contains the snack also shows us that he has a good concept of object permanence. This experiment also gives us an opportunity to observe how well an octopus is able to concentrate on a particular exercise without losing focus.
The trials shown in this video are the first five rounds for this particular octopus. We continued to run this exercise for a little over a month with three different octopuses. The results were fairly similar with each octopus.
In this video, we increase the number of moves by one each round.
In the first round, we make a single movement with the cups.
In the second round, we made two moves.
In the third round of this video, it was supposed to be three moves but the octopus got the best of the handler and snatched the fish away before he could manage to reset.
We repeated this in the fourth round and the final round was the most difficult trial, with a total of four moves.
The results at the end of the month were pretty convincing. We’ll post them below for those of you that are interested in the details.
Correct Selections/Total Trials
Octopus 1
RD1 – 22/25
RD2 – 18/25
RD3 – 17/25
RD4 – 13/25
Octopus 2
RD1 – 20/25
RD2 – 19/25
RD3 – 15/25
RD4 – 12/25
Octopus 3
RD1 – 23/25
RD2 – 18/25
RD3 – 11/25
RD4 – 13/25
As the difficulty increased, so did the errors. There was no sign at any time that the octopus was not aware of the food’s existence after it was hidden. Simply placing the cups in the experiment tank without showing them any food did not get their attention in any way after their initial interaction with the cups.
We hope you enjoyed this video and look forward to sharing more with all of you!
