Aïn Syrina Al, Giret Nicolas, Grand Marion, Kreutzer Michel, Bovet Dalila
Laboratoire d'Ethologie et de Cognition Comparée, Université Paris X-Nanterre, 200, Avenue de la République, 92001, Nanterre cedex, France.
Anim Cogn. 2009 Jan;12(1):145-54. doi: 10.1007/s10071-008-0178-8. Epub 2008 Aug 13.
A wealth of research in infants and animals demonstrates discrimination of quantities, in some cases nonverbal numerical perception, and even elementary calculation capacities. We investigated the ability of three African grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) to select the largest amount of food between two sets, either discrete food items (experiment 1) or as volume of a food substance (experiment 2). The two amounts were presented simultaneously and were visible at the time of choice. Parrots were tested several times for all possible combinations between 1 and 5 seeds or 0.2 and 1 ml of food substance. In both conditions, subjects performed above chance for almost all combinations. Accuracy was negatively correlated with the ratio, that is performance improved with greater differences between amounts. Therefore, these results with both individual items and volume discrimination suggest that parrots use an analogue of magnitude, rather than object-file mechanisms to quantify items and substances.
大量针对婴儿和动物的研究表明，它们能够辨别数量，在某些情况下还具有非语言数字感知能力，甚至具备基本的计算能力。我们研究了三只非洲灰鹦鹉（Psittacus erithacus）在两组食物中选择数量最多的食物的能力，这两组食物要么是离散的食物颗粒（实验1），要么是食物物质的体积（实验2）。两组食物同时呈现，在选择时均可看到。针对1到5颗种子或0.2到1毫升食物物质之间的所有可能组合，对鹦鹉进行了多次测试。在这两种情况下，几乎所有组合的受试鹦鹉表现均高于随机水平。准确性与比例呈负相关，也就是说，数量差异越大，表现越好。因此，这些关于单个物品和体积辨别的结果表明，鹦鹉使用的是一种数量模拟方式，而非客体档案机制来量化物品和物质。
