Auersperg Alice M I, Gajdon Gyula K, von Bayern Auguste M P
Commun Integr Biol. 2012 Mar 1;5(2):140-5. doi: 10.4161/cib.18787.
Comparative cognition aims at unfolding the cognitive processes underlying animal behavior and their evolution, and is concerned with testing hypotheses about the evolution of the brain and intelligence in general. It is a developing field still challenged by conceptual and methodological issues. Systematic cross-species comparisons of cognitive abilities, taking both phylogeny and ecology into account are still scarce. One major reason for this is that it is very hard to find universally applicable paradigms that can be used to investigate the same cognitive ability or 'general intelligence' in several species. Many comparative paradigms have not paid sufficient attention to interspecific differences in anatomical, behavioral and perceptual features, besides psychological variables such as motivation, attentiveness or neophobia, thus potentially producing misrepresentative results. A new stance for future comparative research may be to establish behavioral and psychological profiles prior or alongside to comparing specific cognitive skills across species. Potentially revealing profiles could be obtained from examining species differences in how novel experimental (extractive foraging) tasks are explored and approached, how solutions are discovered and which ones are preferred, how flexibly multiple solutions are used and how much individual variation occurs, before proceeding to more detailed tests. Such new comparative approach is the Multi-Access-Box. It presents the animal with a novel problem that can be solved in several ways thus offering the possibility to examine species differences in all the above, and extract behavioral and perceptual determinants of their performance. Simultaneously, it is a suitable paradigm to collect comparative data about flexibility, innovativeness and problem solving ability, i.e., theoretical covariates of 'general intelligence', in a standardized manner.
比较认知旨在揭示动物行为背后的认知过程及其进化，并总体上关注检验有关大脑和智力进化的假设。它是一个仍受概念和方法问题挑战的发展中领域。考虑到系统发育和生态的认知能力的系统跨物种比较仍然很少。造成这种情况的一个主要原因是，很难找到可用于在多个物种中研究相同认知能力或“一般智力”的普遍适用范式。除了动机、注意力或新恐惧症等心理变量外，许多比较范式没有充分关注解剖学、行为和感知特征方面的种间差异，因此可能产生具有误导性的结果。未来比较研究的一个新立场可能是在跨物种比较特定认知技能之前或同时建立行为和心理特征。在进行更详细的测试之前，通过检查物种在探索和处理新实验（提取性觅食）任务的方式、如何发现解决方案以及更喜欢哪些解决方案、如何灵活使用多种解决方案以及个体差异程度等方面的差异，可能会获得具有启发性的特征。这种新的比较方法就是多通道箱。它为动物呈现一个可以通过多种方式解决的新问题，从而提供了检查上述所有方面的物种差异以及提取其表现的行为和感知决定因素的可能性。同时，它是一种以标准化方式收集有关灵活性、创新性和问题解决能力（即“一般智力”的理论协变量）的比较数据的合适范式。
