Octopuses Have No Personalities and Enjoy HDTV

Whiteox writes about an Australian researcher named Renata Pronk, who has discovered that octopuses prefer HDTV. She recruited 32 gloomy octopuses from the waters of Chowder Bay. Previously, researchers have reported little success when showing video to octopuses. Miss Pronk's insight was that the octopus eye is so refined that it might see standard PAL video, at 25 fps, as a series of stills. She tried HDTV (50 fps) and her subjects reacted to the videos of a crab, another octopus, or a swinging bottle on the end of a string. A further discovery is that octopuses show no trait of individual personalities, even though they exhibit a high level of intelligence. It would certainly be possible to quibble about the definition of "personality" employed, and whether Miss Pronk had successfully measured it.

Comments

Re:Correlation is not causation

[antifoidulus]

People who don't understand statistics and scientific research methods, but like to pretend they are the smartest people on earth, love to say that phrase, just remember that.

Re:Sounds like...

[lgw]

There seem to be a *large* number of people who have convinced themselves that animals with the intelligecne of dogs or cats are non-sentient, and any personality or self awareness that they seem to exhibit is just the owners self-deception. I've seen smart and dumb cats, and smart and dumb dogs. There are certainly cats and dogs which seem to have no personality or mental model of the world, and act like simple stimulus-response system. There are also cats and dogs with clear personalities that interact with the world in a thoughtful manner.

I have to agree that those who say that self-awareness (or at least world-awareness, but it's hard to imagine a good mental model of the world that doesn't include oneself) is limited to humans simply haven't spent the time to know better.