Scarf Damian, Colombo Michael
Department of Psychology, University of Otago.
J Exp Psychol Anim Behav Process. 2011 Oct;37(4):483-7. doi: 10.1037/a0023695.
Ordinal knowledge is a fundamental aspect of advanced cognition. It is self-evident that humans represent ordinal knowledge, and over the past 20 years it has become clear that nonhuman primates share this ability. In contrast, evidence that nonprimate species represent ordinal knowledge is missing from the comparative literature. To address this issue, in the present experiment we trained pigeons on three 4-item lists and then tested them with derived lists in which, relative to the training lists, the ordinal position of the items was either maintained or changed. Similar to the findings with human and nonhuman primates, our pigeons performed markedly better on the maintained lists compared to the changed lists, and displayed errors consistent with the view that they used their knowledge of ordinal position to guide responding on the derived lists. These findings demonstrate that the ability to acquire ordinal knowledge is not unique to the primate lineage. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).
顺序知识是高级认知的一个基本方面。不言而喻，人类具备顺序知识，并且在过去20年里，很明显非人类灵长类动物也拥有这种能力。相比之下，比较文献中缺少非灵长类物种具备顺序知识的证据。为了解决这个问题，在本实验中，我们让鸽子学习三个包含4个项目的列表，然后用派生列表对它们进行测试，相对于训练列表，派生列表中项目的顺序位置要么保持不变，要么发生变化。与人类和非人类灵长类动物的研究结果相似，与顺序位置发生变化的列表相比，我们的鸽子在顺序位置保持不变的列表上表现明显更好，并且所犯错误符合以下观点，即它们利用顺序位置的知识来指导在派生列表上的反应。这些发现表明，获取顺序知识的能力并非灵长类谱系所独有。（《心理学文摘数据库记录》（c）2011美国心理学会，保留所有权利）
