Wood Justin N, Glynn David D, Hauser Marc D
Harvard University, Department of Psychology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
Soc Neurosci. 2008;3(1):60-8. doi: 10.1080/17470910701563442.
A forced-choice social foraging method was used to explore how free-ranging rhesus monkeys make inferences about other individuals' goals and intentions. Subjects saw an experimenter perform an action towards one of two potential food sources, then were allowed to approach and choose one of those sources. Results showed that subjects selectively picked the food source targeted by the experimenter's action only when the action was within the rhesus' motor repertoire. Further studies explored the extent to which rhesus attend to the details of the goal as well as the means by which the goal was obtained, with results paralleling those obtained from cellular recordings of macaque mirror neurons. Monkeys' pattern of success and failure supports the hypothesis that motor areas play a functionally significant role in event parsing and action understanding.
采用强制选择社交觅食方法来探究自由放养的恒河猴如何推断其他个体的目标和意图。实验对象看到一名实验者对两个潜在食物源之一采取行动，然后被允许靠近并选择其中一个食物源。结果表明，只有当该行动在恒河猴的运动技能范围内时，实验对象才会有选择地挑选实验者行动所针对的食物源。进一步的研究探讨了恒河猴关注目标细节以及实现目标方式的程度，其结果与从猕猴镜像神经元的细胞记录中获得的结果相似。猴子的成败模式支持了运动区域在事件解析和动作理解中发挥功能上重要作用这一假设。
