Département Ecologie, Physiologie et Ethologie, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Strasbourg, France.
Anim Cogn. 2012 Sep;15(5):783-95. doi: 10.1007/s10071-012-0502-1. Epub 2012 Apr 25.
Whether or not non-human animals can plan for the future is a hotly debated issue. We investigate this question further and use a planning-to-exchange task to study future planning in the cooperative domain in two species of monkeys: the brown capuchin (Cebus apella) and the Tonkean macaque (Macaca tonkeana). The rationale required subjects to plan for a future opportunity to exchange tokens for food by collecting tokens several minutes in advance. Subjects who successfully planned for the exchange task were expected to select suitable tokens during a collection period (5/10 min), save them for a fixed period of time (20/30 min), then take them into an adjacent compartment and exchange them for food with an experimenter. Monkeys mostly failed to transport tokens when entering the testing compartment; hence, they do not seem able to plan for a future exchange with a human partner. Three subjects did however manage to solve the task several times, albeit at very low rates. They brought the correct version of three possible token types, but rarely transported more than one suitable token at a time. Given that the frequency of token manipulation predicted transport, success might have occurred by chance. This was not the case, however, since in most cases subjects were not already holding the token in their hands before they entered the testing compartment. Instead, these results may reflect subjects' strengths and weaknesses in their time-related comprehension of the task.
非人类动物是否能够规划未来是一个备受争议的问题。我们进一步研究了这个问题，并使用一个计划交换任务来研究两种猴子（卷尾猴和东加长尾猕猴）在合作领域的未来规划。该任务要求被试者提前几分钟收集代币，以规划未来的代币交换食物的机会。成功完成交换任务的被试者预计会在收集期（5/10 分钟）选择合适的代币，将其保存固定的时间段（20/30 分钟），然后将代币带入相邻的隔间，与实验者交换食物。猴子在进入测试隔间时大多无法运输代币；因此，它们似乎无法计划与人类伙伴进行未来的交换。然而，有 3 只猴子确实成功地解决了这个任务几次，尽管成功率非常低。它们带来了三种可能代币类型中的正确版本，但很少一次运输超过一个合适的代币。由于代币操作的频率预测了运输的成功，因此这种成功可能是偶然的。然而，事实并非如此，因为在大多数情况下，猴子在进入测试隔间之前手中并没有拿着代币。相反，这些结果可能反映了被试者在时间相关的任务理解方面的优势和劣势。
