Even Tortoises can Master Touch-Screen Technology

Considering their lack of fingers and opposable thumbs, red-footed tortoises managed to master touch-screen technology rather quickly, a new study describes. Scientists recently taught four of these reptiles to peck at a touchscreen in exchange for a strawberry as a reward.

"Generally people see reptiles as inert, stupid and unresponsive," Anna Wilkinson, an animal cognition expert at the University of Lincoln in England, told Live Science.

Red-footed tortoises, which are native to Central and South America, do not have a hippocampus, an area of the brain associated with learning, memory and spatial navigation. According to Wilkinson, they instead rely on the medial cortex - the part of the brain responsible for complex cognitive behavior and decision making in people.

To better understand how these tortoises learn, Wilkinson and her colleagues at the University of Vienna gave the reptiles treats when they looked at, approached and then pecked on the screen.

"It was surprisingly easy to train them," Wilkinson told The Dodo.

Two of the tortoises were even able to relate icons on a touchscreen to real-world locations, the authors reported in the journal Behavioral Processes.

To earn a berry, they had to learn to consistently peck a blue circle on the left or right side of a screen. All of the tortoises mastered this technique. Two of them even managed to move on to a more advanced task: selecting a blue bowl on the side of the box that mirrored the location of the winning circle on the screen.

However, Jennifer Vonk, a psychologist at Oakland University in Michigan who was not involved with the study, told Live Science that it's possible the tortoises didn't actually make a logical connection between the touchscreen and the bowls, but simply preferred one side over the other.

But the study authors are confident in the tortoises' abilities, and believe that their correct choices indicate "an ability to transfer learning from the touchscreen to a 3-D test arena."

As Wilkinson points out to The Dodo, "animals have to learn to navigate efficiently around their environment to locate food, sun spots and shelter."

The new findings will help researchers compare the cognitive abilities of tortoises to other animals that can perform the same tasks, as well as reinforce prior findings that these creatures are indeed intelligent.