Department of Psychology, University of Trieste, Via S. Anastasio 12, 34123 Trieste, Italy.
Anim Cogn. 2010 May;13(3):463-70. doi: 10.1007/s10071-009-0297-x. Epub 2009 Dec 4.
Animals can reorient making use of the geometric shape of an environment, i.e., using sense and metric properties of surfaces. Animals reared soon after birth either in circular or in rectangular enclosures (and thus affording different experiences with metric properties of the spatial layout) showed similar abilities when tested for spatial reorientation in a rectangular enclosure. Thus, early experience in environments with different geometric characteristics does not seem to affect animals' ability to reorient using sense and metric information. However, some results seem to suggest that when geometric and non-geometric information are set in conflict, rearing experience could affect the relative dominance of featural (landmark) and geometric information. In three separate experiments, newborn chicks reared either in circular- or in rectangular-shaped home-cages were tested for spatial reorientation in a rectangular enclosure, with featural information provided either by panels at the corners or by a blue-coloured wall. At test, when faced with affine transformations in the arrangement of featural information that contrasted with the geometric information, chicks showed no evidence of any effect of early experience on their relative use of geometric and featural information for spatial reorientation. These findings suggest that, at least for this highly precocial species, the ability to deal with geometry seems to depend more on predisposed mechanisms than on learning and experience after hatching.
动物可以利用环境的几何形状重新定位，即利用表面的感知和度量属性。在出生后不久就被饲养在圆形或矩形围栏中的动物（因此获得了不同的空间布局度量属性体验），在矩形围栏中进行空间重新定位测试时表现出相似的能力。因此，早期在具有不同几何特征的环境中的经验似乎不会影响动物使用感知和度量信息重新定位的能力。然而，一些结果似乎表明，当几何和非几何信息发生冲突时，饲养经验可能会影响特征（地标）和几何信息的相对主导地位。在三个单独的实验中，在圆形或矩形形状的家庭笼中饲养的新生小鸡在矩形围栏中进行了空间重新定位测试，特征信息由角落的面板或蓝色墙壁提供。在测试中，当面对特征信息排列的仿射变换与几何信息形成对比时，小鸡没有表现出早期经验对其相对使用几何和特征信息进行空间重新定位的任何影响的证据。这些发现表明，至少对于这种高度早熟的物种，处理几何形状的能力似乎更多地取决于预先存在的机制，而不是孵化后的学习和经验。
