“The other thing I’ve been telling folks is that, if there’s one thing I could change and re-do about this study, I would make the hardest solutions that we set up even more difficult for them.” ~ Hannah Griebling

The research made headlines: the raccoon raiding your garbage can might just be solving puzzles for the fun of it.

Animal behavior scientist Hannah Griebling’s work focuses on raccoon cognition and human-wildlife conflict. Short version: they win. They love the challenge.

The masked bandit as a curiosity role model!

Keep trying. You’ll figure it out. And if you can’t, just use brute force. That’s what I’ve learned from them.

Hannah and I talked about being built for exploration, the intersection of diet and curiosity, innovation understood as solving new problems or old problems in a new way, the universal appeal of marshmallows, balancing exploration and exploitation, designing research with the subject’s success in mind, the intrinsic value of “information foraging”, our interspecies cognitive arms race — and the power of persistence.

Listen to #328: Curiosity in Raccoons, with Hannah Griebling

Hannah Griebling is a PhD Candidate in the Animal Behavior and Cognition Lab, in the Department of Forest & Conservation Sciences, at the University of British Columbia. 

Read Hannah’s nice piece in The Conversation, a great source of “academic rigor and journalistic flair.” Check out the research — and videos of the raccoons solving the puzzle boxes, linked at Appendix A. Supplementary data of Hannah’s paper, Raccoons optimally forage for information: exploration–exploitation trade-offs in innovation.

Want to know more about curiosity in other animals? Check out these C2BC Classics: Curiosity Promotes Biodiversity, with Carolin Sommer-Trembo; Orcas: A Whale of a Curiosity, with Sara Shimazu & Jeff Friedman; Curiosity in Apes, with Sofia Forss; Animal Curiosity at the National Zoo; and Ode to Crows, with Colleen & John Marzluff.

Theme music by Sean Balick; “Variation 19″ by Blue Nocturnal, via Blue Dot Sessions.

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