Form over function: Striped skunks (mephitis mephitis) learn arbitrary visual patterns to solve the slat-pulling task.

Abstract

Striped skunks are omnivorous generalists with patchily distributed food-two selection pressures that are purported to drive the evolution of cognition. Despite this, the cognitive abilities of skunks have rarely been tested. Using the slat-pulling task, we assessed the ability of three striped skunks to reason about the visual patterns of support when two slats were presented (one supporting a food item). We used both functional slats (real wooden slats that gave subjects both visual and functional information when manipulated) and purely representational slats in an arbitrary version of the task (painted lines that provided only visual information). All three skunks found the arbitrary task difficult to learn but nevertheless learned to solve it after thousands of trials. They appeared to respond to visual patterns of contact and perceptual containment between food and painted lines to solve several configurations of the task. Interestingly, only one of three skunks learned to pull supportive over unsupportive slats (despite the addition of functional information). This subject had first learned the visual pattern associated with reward in the arbitrary version, thus showing the transfer of visual patterns from the arbitrary to the functional task. Overall, striped skunks demonstrated the ability to use visual patterns to solve problems despite their relatively poor vision and difficulty in learning the tasks. These findings provide further support for the idea that slat-pulling tasks can be solved by visual pattern learning alone and that this possibility needs to be controlled for in tasks assessing abstract causal reasoning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).