Forscher stecken ein Tablet in Marmosets Käfig mit stillen Videos anderer Primaten. Als ein Marmoset auf ein Video klopfte, zoomte er ein und plauderte Geräusche. Innerhalb weniger Wochen klopften die meisten Marmosets regelmäßig, selbst wenn die Belohnung weggenommen wurde. In vielerlei Hinsicht funktioniert es wie eine Sucht.

I’ve linked to the news release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/06k3f6x5

From the linked article:

Humans are not the only ones who can get pulled into spending a lot of time staring at a screen. In a recent study, common marmosets, small South American monkeys, learned to tap videos on a computerized tablet, just to make the image bigger and hear chattering sounds. There was no food, no treats, nothing you would normally think of as a reward. Just the screen itself was enough to keep them doing it over and over again. If that sounds familiar, it should. The same kind of thing happens when people keep scrolling through social media or checking their cell phone long after they meant to stop. Looking at how another primate gets hooked on a screen can help us understand what is going on with our own screen habits.

In a study by Ando and colleagues (2025), **researchers put a tablet in each marmoset’s cage with nine small, silent videos of other primates. When a marmoset tapped one of the videos, that video zoomed in and chattering sounds played. That was all it took. Within a few weeks, most of the marmosets were tapping regularly. Even when the reward was taken away, some of them kept tapping anyway**. This suggests that the interaction itself and the change on the screen were enough to keep them going. That is exactly the kind of thing we see in human screen habits, too. People get drawn in by notifications, endless scrolling, and the way the screen changes, even if they are not getting anything all that useful from it.

**In many ways, it works like an addiction**. Addiction usually means doing something because it feels good or rewarding in the moment, even if it does not give you much real benefit. With smartphones, people can spend hours on them and end up with nothing to show for it. Sometimes it even makes life worse because time on the phone takes the place of time with people who are right there in front of us. Anyone who has walked into a restaurant has seen it: two people sitting across from each other, both staring at their phones. In that moment, whatever is on the screen seems more important than talking to the person across the table.

Addiction is if they would have stopped eating, sleeping, interacting with others etc. This is an attempt to call something someone doesn’t like an „addiction“ or „like an addiction“