Research Centre in Evolutionary Anthropology and Palaeoecology, School of Natural Sciences and Psychology, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool L3 3AF, UK.
Am J Phys Anthropol. 2010 Oct;143(2):188-97. doi: 10.1002/ajpa.21305.
Differences in cognitive skills across taxa, and between monkeys and apes in particular, have been explained by different hypotheses, although these often are not supported by systematic interspecific comparisons. Here, we directly compared the cognitive performance of the four great apes and three monkey species (spider monkeys, capuchin monkeys, and long-tailed macaques), differing in their phylogenetic-relatedness and socioecology. We tested subjects on their ability to remember object locations (memory task), track object displacements (transposition task), and obtain out-of-reach rewards (support task). Our results showed no support for an overall clear-cut distinction in cognitive skills between monkeys and apes as species performance varied substantially across tasks. Although we found differences in performance at tracking object displacements between monkeys and apes, interspecific differences in the other two tasks were better explained in terms of differential socioecology, especially differential levels of fission-fusion dynamics. A cluster analysis using mean scores of each condition of the three tasks for each species suggested that the only dichotomy might be between members of the genus Pan and the rest of the tested species. These findings evidence the importance of using multiple tasks across multiple species in a comparative perspective to test different explanations for the enhancement of specific cognitive skills.
不同分类单元之间，特别是猴子和猿之间的认知技能差异，可以用不同的假说解释，尽管这些假说往往没有通过系统的种间比较得到支持。在这里，我们直接比较了四种大猿和三种猴子（蜘蛛猴、卷尾猴和长尾猕猴）的认知表现，它们在系统发育关系和社会生态学方面存在差异。我们在记忆任务、目标位移追踪任务和获取遥不可及的奖励任务上测试了被试的能力。我们的结果不支持猴子和猿类之间存在认知技能的明显区别，因为物种在不同任务中的表现存在很大差异。虽然我们在追踪目标位移方面发现了猴子和猿类之间的表现差异，但在其他两个任务中的种间差异可以更好地用不同的社会生态学来解释，特别是不同程度的分裂-融合动态。对每个物种三个任务的每个条件的平均得分进行聚类分析表明，唯一的二分法可能是在属 Pan 的成员和其他测试物种之间。这些发现证明了在比较视角下使用多种任务和多种物种来测试特定认知技能增强的不同解释的重要性。
