School of Psychology, University St Andrews, St Andrews, KY16 9JP, Scotland, United Kingdom; Budongo Conservation Field Station, Masindi, Uganda.
Sci Rep. 2011;1:128. doi: 10.1038/srep00128. Epub 2011 Nov 3.
The notion of animal culture, defined as socially transmitted community-specific behaviour patterns, remains controversial, notably because the definition relies on surface behaviours without addressing underlying cognitive processes. In contrast, human cultures are the product of socially acquired ideas that shape how individuals interact with their environment. We conducted field experiments with two culturally distinct chimpanzee communities in Uganda, which revealed significant differences in how individuals considered the affording parts of an experimentally provided tool to extract honey from a standardised cavity. Firstly, individuals of the two communities found different functional parts of the tool salient, suggesting that they experienced a cultural bias in their cognition. Secondly, when the alternative function was made more salient, chimpanzees were unable to learn it, suggesting that prior cultural background can interfere with new learning. Culture appears to shape how chimpanzees see the world, suggesting that a cognitive component underlies the observed behavioural patterns.
动物文化的概念被定义为通过社会传递的特定于群体的行为模式，仍然存在争议，特别是因为该定义依赖于表面行为，而没有涉及潜在的认知过程。相比之下，人类文化是通过社会习得的观念塑造的，这些观念影响着个体与环境的互动方式。我们在乌干达的两个具有文化差异的黑猩猩社区进行了实地实验，这些实验揭示了个体在考虑实验提供的工具的可利用部分以从标准化的腔体内提取蜂蜜时存在显著差异。首先，两个社区的个体发现了工具的不同功能部分很突出，这表明它们的认知受到了文化偏见的影响。其次，当替代功能变得更加突出时，黑猩猩无法学习它，这表明先前的文化背景可能会干扰新的学习。文化似乎塑造了黑猩猩看待世界的方式，这表明观察到的行为模式背后存在认知成分。
