Last night our kits saw for the first time what happens to the dams in the rain, and Worth A Dam was there like nervous preschool moms on the first day of class. You could tell they were surprised at the development, especially when the ‘gap’ they usually cross over was a fast moving waterfall. Our fattest kit kept ducking in the area again and again, wondering what it felt like to swim in a space that used to be a ‘toll road’. After nosing the gap and the pouring water several times, he appeared to snag a tiny reed and stick it in the hole. His sibling busied himself by dragging a little mud off the bottom before abandoning the effort entirely.
Great start kids, but let’s leave these big jobs to the grownups, okay?
There may be skeptics among you that question my editorializing comments describing our kits as ‘surprised’. Don’t worry. We have the vast field of infant research to support our thinking on this. The concept of ‘habituation’ and ‘dishabituation’ have been reliably studied for 50 years as a way to learn about the psychological world of the infant. The idea is that you get ‘used’ to certain conditions or stimuli, and stop noticing them. Then when they change you’re ‘surprised’ and you react.
This is important because the ‘surprise’ allows us to infer that the individual under study has a complicated, non-verbal experience stored in their memories and is able to refer to it. “Surprise” happens when the new picture or situation doesn’t match their internal experience and that’s what we call ‘Dishabituation.’ One of the favorite studies I remember reading about in college used this concept to show that babies were capable of self-awareness as very young infants: the ‘blush test’. A baby is shown its image in the mirror enough times that it becomes ‘habituated’ to it. Then the infant is given a red spot of blush and shown their reflection again. In most cases they laugh or are startled. The surprise response tells us that infants have a pretty complex understanding about their appearance, a notion of what mirrors can be expected to do and an awareness of the concept of change in general.
Using the same technique of monitoring dishabituation, we can see that the beavers were very surprised last night. In fact there were at least three tail slaps, (two kit and one adult) for no observable reason whatsoever. Since the beavers reacted to the changes in water we can infer that they have a pretty solid nonverbal internal concept of what the water is usually like; how fast the current flows, what shapes lurk on the bottom, and how far they have to swim to touch the mud. Their world was pretty different yesterday.
As we’ve seen in the past, they seemed to notice the difference and adapt.
The above photo was snagged from the internet, and let me just say that if you google pictures of ‘beavers in the rain’ you get exactly 2 options. This is clearly an untapped subject for study. Cheryl? Can you fix that?
