Department of Psychology, Kennesaw State University, 1000 Chastain Road, Kennesaw, GA 30144, USA.
Am J Primatol. 2013 Apr;75(4):376-86. doi: 10.1002/ajp.22118. Epub 2013 Jan 8.
We examined object permanence in black-and-white-ruffed lemurs (Varecia variegata) at Zoo Atlanta. A series of visible and invisible displacement tasks with suitable controls were presented to five adult subjects. Subjects performed significantly above chance on all regular tasks, except for the double invisible displacements. Subjects failed visible and invisible controls. Failure on the control trials did not appear to be because subjects used the "last box touched" strategy (subjects did not choose the last box touched significantly more than expected by chance). However, a substantial percentage of choices was made to the last box touched by the experimenter. There was no significant difference between this percentage, and the percentage of choices made to the baited box (on both visible and invisible controls), which indicates that subjects were drawn to both boxes which the experimenter visited/touched, and thus failed the controls. Based on the results from the present study, we believe that there is no evidence that black-and-white ruffed lemurs understand visible and invisible tasks in the traditional object permanence battery.
我们在亚特兰大动物园研究了黑白领狐猴（Varecia variegata）的客体永久性。我们向五名成年个体展示了一系列具有适当对照的可见和不可见位移任务。除了双重不可见位移任务外，所有常规任务中，个体的表现均显著高于随机水平。个体在可见和不可见对照任务中失败。对照试验的失败似乎不是因为个体使用了“最后触摸的盒子”策略（个体选择最后触摸的盒子的次数并不显著多于随机预期）。然而，相当大比例的选择是针对实验者最后触摸的盒子做出的。这一比例与诱饵盒的选择比例（在可见和不可见对照任务中）之间没有显著差异，这表明个体被实验者访问/触摸的两个盒子所吸引，因此对照任务失败。基于本研究的结果，我们认为没有证据表明黑白领狐猴能够理解传统客体永久性测试中的可见和不可见任务。
