Konrad Lorenz Forschungsstelle Gruenau, Core Facility University of Vienna, 4645 Grünau im Almtal, Austria.
Proc Biol Sci. 2012 Oct 22;279(1745):4135-42. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2012.1292. Epub 2012 Aug 8.
Our ability to make logical inferences is considered as one of the cornerstones of human intelligence, fuelling investigations of reasoning abilities in non-human animals. Yet, the evidence to date is equivocal, with apes as the prime candidates to possess these skills. For instance, in a two-choice task, apes can identify the location of hidden food if it is indicated by a rattling noise caused by the shaking of a baited container. More importantly, they also use the absence of noise during the shaking of the empty container to infer that this container is not baited. However, since the inaugural report of apes solving this task, to the best of our knowledge, no comparable evidence could be found in any other tested species such as monkeys and dogs. Here, we report the first successful and instantaneous solution of the shaking task through logical inference by a non-ape species, the African grey parrot. Surprisingly, the performance of the birds was sensitive to the shaking movement: they were successful with containers shaken horizontally, but not with vertical shaking resembling parrot head-bobbing. Thus, grey parrots seem to possess ape-like cross-modal reasoning skills, but their reliance on these abilities is influenced by low-level interferences.
我们进行逻辑推理的能力被认为是人类智力的基石之一，这推动了对非人类动物推理能力的研究。然而，迄今为止的证据尚无定论，黑猩猩等类人猿是拥有这些技能的主要候选者。例如，在二选一的任务中，如果摇晃装有诱饵的容器会发出嘎嘎声，则黑猩猩可以识别出隐藏食物的位置。更重要的是，它们还利用在摇晃空容器时没有噪音来推断该容器没有诱饵。但是，自首次报道黑猩猩解决此任务以来，据我们所知，在猴子和狗等任何其他测试物种中都没有发现可比的证据。在这里，我们报告了第一个通过逻辑推理成功解决摇晃任务的非类人猿物种，非洲灰鹦鹉。令人惊讶的是，鸟类的表现对摇晃运动很敏感：它们可以成功处理水平摇晃的容器，但不能处理类似于鹦鹉点头的垂直摇晃。因此，灰鹦鹉似乎具有类人猿的跨模态推理能力，但它们对这些能力的依赖受到低级干扰的影响。
