you're about to witness a groundbreaking yet oddly adorable psychological experiment this cuttlefish after days of training will succeed in a test of Temptation originally designed for humans challenging our understanding of the origins of intelligence which is surprising because cuttlefish are widely different from humans they live relatively solitary lives they have three hearts they have a beak like a Parrot uh they also have little muscles that can extend to make their skin look bumpy it can change texture and color within the blink of an eye but to survive cuddlefish seem to need one more trick Mind Over [Music] Matter this child is taking part in a now famous similarly adorable experiment in the Stanford marshmallow experiment preschool age kids are given a single marshmallow they're told they can eat it immediately or they could wait 15 minutes for the experimented to return if they're able to resist temptation for 15 minutes they would get a second marshmallow TV shows and parents have tried the marshmallow experiment on different kinds of kids just to see all the cuteness that happens when a kid is trying to resist a marshmallow many people have recreated this experiment posting adorable vide vide of kids displaying specific interesting behaviors often the children who were able to do the best in the marshmallow experiment are the ones who can distract themselves away from that marshmallow so often they'll look away or close their eyes or sing a little song to themselves or even pretend that that marshmallow is something else delayed gratification is the ability to resist the temptation of an immediate pleasure in the service of a long-term more valuable reward so the ability to delay gratification uh usually starts to develop around 3 or 4 years of age and by five usually most kids are pretty good at this this experiment has been adapted to look for self-control in animals one really important way we try to understand the evolution of cognition including the origins of human cognition is by looking out into the natural world and trying to see how other animals think and solve problems we tested delay of gratification in primates by giving them a decision between a smaller amount of food they could have right now and a larger amount of food that they had to wait some delay to receive we found that chimpanzees were willing to wait about 2 minutes in order to get four extra grapes up until recently Advanced self-control like this had only been observed in Social species such as Apes crows and parrots the social intelligence hypothesis proposes that more complex cognition evolves in response to social pressures because animals need to constantly outwit others or cooperate with others in order to be successful one important component onent of intelligence is self-control especially when it comes to being social but if cuttlefish who are solitary have self-control then there may be a different or perhaps second nonsocial origin to self-control and intelligence here at the Marine biological laboratory in Massachusetts Alex Schnell Roger hanlin and their colleagues devis a way to adapt the marshmallow test for cuttlefish in this experiment we wanted to test whether the Cuttlefish could wait for a preferred prey item over a less preferred prey item so the first step of the experiment is to determine the prey preferences of each cuttlefish we offer the Cuttlefish two different types of prey live prey and non-live prey these cuttlefish are usually fed prefrozen shrimp [Music] but cuddlefish are very visual Predators so more often than not they prefer live prey over non-live prey since scientists haven't quite figured out how to set these tentacle test subjects down to describe the rules of the experiment the researchers created a system of underwater Chambers to get the idea across we present a cuttlefish with a chamber marked with a circle first we lower the chamber into the tank with the Cuttlefish we drop some food in there and then as the Cuttlefish approaches the chamber we open the door immediately so the Cuttlefish can access the food [Music] inside we then present the cuttlefish with a chamber marked with a triangle we lower this chamber into the tank drop some food inside but this time when the Cuttlefish approaches the door doesn't open the Cuttlefish usually responds by attacking the chamber with its feeding tentacles but the door won't open for several seconds for up to a few [Music] minutes finally when the door opens the cuddlefish strikes the prey inside shooting out its feeding tentacles [Music] after a few days the Cuttlefish learns that the chamber with the circle means that the prey within can be accessed immediately whereas the chamber with the triangle can only be accessed after a delay the next step is to train the Cuttlefish to learn that the choice between the two food items is mutually exclusive it can only take one prey item the other one will be removed we lower both Chambers inside the tank but this time they are not marked with any visual shapes we drop the same pray items inside each chamber when the Cuttlefish approaches one chamber to access the food inside the food in the other chamber is immediately removed so the Cuttlefish quickly learns that it can only eat one of the prey atoms inside one chamber now we can move on to the final phase of the experiment where we test for self-control in the Cuttlefish we insert both Chambers into the Cuttlefish tank one marked with a circle and one marked with the triangle remember the circles associated with food that's accessible immediately while the triangle signifies food that the Cuttlefish needs to wait for in the chamber with the circle we drop non-live prey Which is less preferable and in the chamber with the triangle we drop live prey which is more preferable the Cuttlefish is now faced with a difficult decision it can access the less referable non-live prey in the circle chamber immediately or it can wait for the door to open in the delay chamber so it can access the preferable prey even as the door to the shrimp opens the cuddlefish awaits it seems to have learned that if it goes for the non-live shrimp then its preferred food the live crawfish will be removed this is a challenging decision so the Cuttlefish tries to distract Itself by looking away from the prey that's immediately available which is reminiscent of of some of the children's behavior in the marshmallow experiment after a minute the door finally opens to the delay chamber and the Cuttlefish that's been waiting very patiently can finally access its reward inside this is the first time that we've seen Advanced self-control in an invertebrate species in a species that isn't long lived and isn't social it's really exciting that an animal like a cuttlefish can succeed in such a problem this tells us that you don't need to be living in a complex social environment in order to evolve this particular [Music] skill so in this hypothesis animals evolve more complex cognition because of the difficulties of finding food in their natural environments as for why cuttlefish may have developed this intelligent Behavior Alex Schnell has a hypothesis cuttlefish stay camouflage from the majority of the time but in order to pursue food they need to break camouflage which exposes them to predators this is crucial to their survival since unlike other mollusks like clams they have no outer shell to protect them from predators cuttlefish might have evolved self-control in order to optimize their predatory excursions to attack their prey at the right time and to limit their exposure to predators in the wild something like a non-live shrimp may not be valuable enough to take the risk whereas a live crayfish would be so this could be evolutionary advantage just for the Cuttlefish what this kind of work tells us is that we can look out into the natural world to creatures that look so different from us with different kinds of brains and different kinds of Lifestyles and still see these same glimmers of intelligence and that brings us to other questions about whether we could find self-control in other non-social animals because these cuttlefish have shown that you don't need to be social to develop agency or willpower you just need to be a picky risk averse those qualities may even be part of why we and other vertebrates all of whom forage and try to avoid Predators have self-control the ability to hold off on what's in front of us and save room for dessert [Music]