Scientists teach pigs to use joystick and play video games

Yorkshire Hamlet and Omelette pigs and Panepinto Ebony and Ivory micro pigs are ambassadors for their species. The quartet was the focus of a study that tested whether they could learn to play video games. Spoiler alert: they were very good at this.

Purace’s animal behavior expert Candace Croney and chimpanzee cognition expert Sarah Boysen co-authored a study on pigs published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology on Thursday. The study narrates an experiment to investigate the cognitive processes (“like memory, attention and conceptualization”) of farm animals.

The experiment involved first teaching the pigs how to manipulate a joystick using their snouts. They were then taught to use the joystick to play a video game on a monitor in front of them. The pigs are not rescuing Princess Peach yet, but they have shown a remarkable ability to learn and operate the game.

“Each pig performed the tasks far above chance, indicating that the animal understood that the movement of the joystick was connected to the cursor on the computer screen,” he told Frontiers in a statement.

The pigs were rewarded with food for playing the game correctly, but they also responded to verbal encouragement.

Frontiers said the pigs “did not meet the criteria used by primates to demonstrate complete mastery of the concept”, but the researchers suspect that this may be related to how the experiment works. It is not designed for animals with long-term vision with limited dexterity. Scientists suggest that a touchscreen may be an option to be explored in the future.

The study was small and limited in scope, but it may have implications for scientists’ understanding of the pigs’ intelligence and the animals’ learning ability. The researchers are interested in furthering the study to see if computers and symbols can be used to communicate with pigs.

“It is no small feat for an animal to understand the concept that the behavior it is performing is having an effect elsewhere,” said Croney. “The fact that pigs can do this to any degree should give us a break to learn what else they are capable of learning and how that learning can impact them.”