Schmitt Vanessa, Fischer Julia
Cognitive Ethology, German Primate Center, Göttingen, Germany.
J Comp Psychol. 2009 Aug;123(3):316-25. doi: 10.1037/a0016218.
Apes use inferential reasoning by exclusion to locate food both in the visual and auditory domain. To test whether olive baboons (Papio hamadryas anubis) show similar abilities as the apes object choice experiments with differing information about food located in 1 of 2 cups were conducted in the visual and auditory modality. Although all baboons (N = 7) were able to locate the reward when they had previously seen it, they failed to make use of auditory cues or arbitrary acoustic signals. When only partial information was given (i.e., only 1 cup was opened) 4 of the baboons were apparently able to infer the location of the reward by reasoning, whereas the other 3 may have adopted an alternative strategy ("avoid the empty cup"). In addition, 3 of the baboons were able to use arbitrary visual markers to locate the food reward. The results suggest that inferential reasoning is not restricted to apes but is shared with Old World monkeys. Furthermore, they also highlight some important differences in the processing of auditory versus visual information in operant conditioning settings.
猿类通过排除法进行推理，以此在视觉和听觉领域中定位食物。为了测试东非狒狒（阿拉伯狒狒）是否具备与猿类相似的能力，研究人员在视觉和听觉模式下进行了物体选择实验，实验中两个杯子中的一个放置了食物，提供了关于食物位置的不同信息。尽管所有狒狒（N = 7）在之前看到奖励时都能找到它，但它们未能利用听觉线索或任意声学信号。当只给出部分信息时（即只打开一个杯子），4只狒狒显然能够通过推理推断出奖励的位置，而其他3只可能采用了另一种策略（“避开空杯子”）。此外，3只狒狒能够使用任意视觉标记来定位食物奖励。结果表明，推理并不局限于猿类，旧世界猴也具备这种能力。此外，研究结果还突出了在操作性条件反射环境中，听觉信息与视觉信息处理方面的一些重要差异。
