Chapter 282: Hide and Seek Experiment
Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio
Sun Xiaomeng bit her lower lip, her eyes fixated on Richard.
Despite her thinking hard to recall, she still couldn’t remember a thing about any related experiments. After all, she just read those reports and essays out of interest. Many of them were written in English, containing many terms in animal psychology and making the literature very hard to comprehend, leaving only fragmented and not profound impressions in her mind.
In addition, the noise from downstairs also made her unable to concentrate. Several times when she was about to think of something, her thinking was interrupted by a construction noise. She had the urge to rush downstairs and ask them to stop and continue their work after she had figured it out.
The kitchen door was quietly pushed open again, and both Sun Xiaomeng and Richard looked at the door. She thought Zhang Zian was back, and she grew even more anxious. If he was back and began his stupid talking, she would never recall any experiment.
Nobody was at the door, so her eyes looked down.
Galaxy was squatting at the door, looking smart, and its silver-grey eyes were gazing at Richard.
"Quack?" Richard felt Galaxy had something to say to it, so it asked out loud.
"Meow, hide-and-seek!" After saying these few words, Galaxy turned around quickly and ran away.
From what Sun Xiaomeng heard, Galaxy was just making some cute "meowing" sounds.
She increasingly felt that Galaxy was very strange today because it actually was repeatedly approaching her.
"Quack? Hide-and-seek?" Richard repeated.
As if a lightning had struck the permanent dark sky, Sun Xiaomeng suddenly remembered, it was hide-and-seek!
"Richard, you want to play hide-and-seek?" She turned to Richard.
"Quack?"
Richard didn’t understand what she meant. Richard wanted to say, "I’m not playing such a childish game. If you want to play, go play with the black and white kitten. Leave me out of this," but it could not say such things to Sun Xiaomeng.
Since Sun Xiaomeng already knew that Richard could understand her words, and Richard didn’t refuse, she believed that Richard had agreed acquiescently.
She looked around. As a single person, Zhang Zian’s kitchen was not too messy, but she was hoping it could be a little bit messier now.
"These might work." She noticed a few glass spice jars on the shelves, each of which was the size of a child’s fist, containing chicken essence, sesame oil, vinegar, salt and sugar, respectively. The five spice jars were of a set, and their sizes were exactly the same, with only the caps different in color, which were in red, yellow, green, blue and white, respectively.
She said to Zhang Zian inside her heart, "I'm sorry for borrowing these without your permission, I will apologize to you when you come back".
Sun Xiaomeng put these five spice jars one by one in front of Richard.
Richard thought she was asking it to identify the colors of the caps, which was a piece of cake for it. Richard answered even before she asked, "Red, yellow, green, blue, and white."
Sun Xiaomeng smiled, "No, I’m not asking you the colors of these caps... but you are totally right, impressive. Now, pay attention to my words, how many jars are here in total?"
"Five." Richard quickly responded. That was way too easy for it.
She picked up a stainless-steel soup pot, turned it upside down and covered the red spice jar, completely blocking it.
"How many are there now?"
Richard hesitated, uncertain of whether it should count the one that was blocked.
"Five," it answered.
"How many can you see?" she asked.
"Four." This time it answered immediately.
Hearing these two answers, Sun Xiaomeng’s heart skipped a beat, and her palms were slightly sweating.
This seemingly very easy experiment was used by Piaget, the most outstanding cognitive development theorist in the 20th century, to determine children's cognitive abilities. Inspired when using toys to play hide-and-seek with his son, he developed a thorough and complete theory, naming it "the experiment of object permanence."
Simply put, the experiment began by placing an object in front of the subject, then blocking or covering the object, and then observing the subject's response. If the subject knew that the object did not disappear, that it was still there but was invisible to the subject, then the subject would be demonstrating that it already knew the meaning of "existence".
Many times, the process of a scientific experiment was very simple. The difference between scientists and ordinary people was that scientists had the insight to interpret the experiment from a novel perspective. For example, by letting two iron balls hit the ground at the same time, Galileo had proved the law of free fall; by using a prism to split the sun ray into seven colors, Newton had laid the foundation for spectral analysis...
Though the object was invisible to its eyes, Richard knew it was there, meaning that Richard's cognitive ability was at least equal to that of a one-year-old infant.
Sun Xiaomeng would not look down on Richard anymore. She was not facing a pet bird, but an intelligent creature. The difference between Richard and other parrots was probably bigger than the difference between Einstein and average people.
She took a deep breath, trying to maintain her calm expression so as not to make Richard feel any pressure, "Well, be careful, I'm going to level up the difficulty."
Sun Xiaomeng half-lifted the soup pot, quietly hiding the red jar in her right palm, put down the soup pot again, and hid her right hand behind herself.
"Where's the red jar?" she asked Richard.
Richard didn’t see what she just did, so it replied, "Under the pot."
Sun Xiaomeng lifted open the pot with her left hand. It was empty.
"Quack?" Richard shouted in surprise, and understood what happened immediately, "In your right hand."
Sun Xiaomeng took out her right hand from behind her. Her right hand was empty as well.
Richard thought for a moment, "In your pocket."
Sun Xiaomeng nodded, taking out the red jar from her white coat and placing it side by side with the other four jars.
"Congratulations, you're right."
"Quack! So easy!"
Richard was in a good mood by her compliment. It remembered that it seemed to have played a similar game before. The forms were slightly different, but essentially, they were the same. Only then, Richard did not like such a game, because it was difficult to play, and Richard often encountered failure and frustration, so it was always in a bad mood. However, after becoming an Elf, the game seemed so simple that it kept cursing itself in the past as an "idiot" in its mind.
Sun Xiaomeng smiled unnaturally. She could not accurately describe her feelings at this moment. Richard’s performance once again was beyond her understanding. Through this experiment, Richard had proved that its cognitive ability had at least reached the level of 2-year-old child, and the experimental process was rather easy for Richard, who passed quickly.
She believed that Richard could still pass the further steps of the experiment. What would be its highest limit? Would it reach the recognition ability of a three-year-old child? Four? Five? Ten? Twelve years old?
It can speak, think, and it possessed recognition ability. Apart from the appearance of a bird, did it have any essential difference from human beings?
From what she remembered, there was only one parrot in the world that had passed the experiment, but it died young when its recognition ability had reached the level of a five-year-old child. The death of that grey parrot was considered to be a huge loss to the scientific and educational communities.
Now, standing in front of her was a living intelligent parrot, which may even be more outstanding than the deceased one!
She felt very sad. How come Zhang Zian was so lucky as to have all the good stuffs?
The kitchen door was pushed open again—from the previous two experiences, she thought it was Galaxy again. So, she lowered her eyes, trying to say hello to Galaxy and asked it to stay. But she only saw a human’s feet in casual shoes.
Zhang Zian looked at her, and looked at Richard. He felt the atmosphere in the kitchen was a bit unusual.
"What are you doing?" he asked.