Hauser Marc, Spaulding Bailey
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2006 May 2;103(18):7181-5. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0601247103. Epub 2006 Apr 25.
Human infants and adults generate causal inferences about the physical world from observations of single, novel events, thereby violating Hume's thesis that spatiotemporal cooccurrence from prior experience drives causal perception in our species. Is this capacity unique or shared with other animals? We address this question by presenting the results of three experiments on free-ranging rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta), focusing specifically on their capacity to generate expectations about the nature of completely unfamiliar physical transformations. By using an expectancy violation looking-time method, each experiment presented subjects with either physically possible or impossible transformations of objects (e.g., a knife, as opposed to a glass of water, appears to cut an apple in half). In both experiments, subjects looked longer when the transformation was impossible than when it was possible. Follow up experiments ruled out that these patterns could be explained by association. These results show that in the absence of training or direct prior experience, rhesus monkeys generate causal inferences from single, novel events, using their knowledge of the physical world to guide such expectations.
人类婴儿和成年人通过对单个新颖事件的观察，对物理世界进行因果推断，从而违背了休谟的观点，即我们这个物种的因果感知是由先前经验中的时空共现驱动的。这种能力是人类独有的，还是与其他动物共有的？我们通过展示对自由放养的恒河猴（猕猴）进行的三个实验结果来解决这个问题，特别关注它们对完全不熟悉的物理转变的性质产生预期的能力。通过使用预期违背注视时间方法，每个实验向受试者展示物体的物理上可能或不可能的转变（例如，一把刀，而不是一杯水，似乎把一个苹果切成两半）。在两个实验中，当转变不可能时，受试者的注视时间比可能时更长。后续实验排除了这些模式可以用联想来解释的可能性。这些结果表明，在没有训练或直接先前经验的情况下，恒河猴利用它们对物理世界的知识，从单个新颖事件中产生因果推断，以指导此类预期。
