Jones Sarah M, Cantlon Jessica F, Merritt Dustin J, Brannon Elizabeth M
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0999, United States.
Behav Processes. 2010 Feb;83(2):191-6. doi: 10.1016/j.beproc.2009.12.009. Epub 2009 Dec 14.
Do monkeys anchor their numerical judgments based on the context in which their choices are presented? We addressed this question by varying the numerical range across sessions while macaque monkeys made ordinal judgments. Monkeys were trained to make a conditional discrimination whereby they were reinforced for ordering arrays of dots in ascending or descending numerical order, dependent on a color cue. Monkeys were tested using two ranges of numerosities that converged on a single pair. Similar to the findings of Cantlon and Brannon (2005), we found a semantic congruity effect whereby decision time was systematically influenced by the congruity between the cue (ascending or descending) and the relative Numerical Magnitude of the stimuli within each range. Furthermore, monkeys showed a context effect, such that decision time for a given pair was dependent on whether it was a relatively small or large set of values compared to the other values presented in that session. This finding suggests that, similar to humans, the semantic congruity effect observed in monkeys is anchored by the context. Thus our data provide further evidence for the existence of a shared numerical comparison process in monkeys and humans.
猴子会根据其做出选择时的情境来锚定它们的数字判断吗？我们通过在猕猴进行顺序判断时改变各实验环节中的数字范围来解决这个问题。猴子接受训练以进行条件辨别，即根据颜色提示，按升序或降序对点阵进行排序时会得到强化。使用两组在一对数字上收敛的数字范围对猴子进行测试。与坎特隆和布兰农（2005年）的研究结果相似，我们发现了一种语义一致性效应，即决策时间会受到提示（升序或降序）与每个范围内刺激的相对数字大小之间一致性的系统性影响。此外，猴子表现出一种情境效应，即对于给定的一对数字，决策时间取决于与该实验环节中呈现的其他值相比，它是相对较小还是较大的一组值。这一发现表明，与人类相似，在猴子身上观察到的语义一致性效应是以情境为基础的。因此，我们的数据为猴子和人类存在共享的数字比较过程提供了进一步的证据。
