Dahl Christoph D, Adachi Ikuma
Section of Language and Intelligence , Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University , Inuyama , Japan ; Department of Psychology , National Taiwan University , Taipei , Taiwan.
Elife. 2013 Oct 22;2:e00932. doi: 10.7554/eLife.00932.
Conceptual metaphors are linguistic constructions. Such a metaphor is humans' mental representation of social rank as a pyramidal-like structure. High-ranked individuals are represented in higher positions than low-ranked individuals. We show that conceptual metaphorical mapping between social rank and the representational domain exists in our closest evolutionary relatives, the chimpanzees. Chimpanzee participants were requested to discriminate face identities in a vertical arrangement. We found a modulation of response latencies by the rank of the presented individual and the position on the display: a high-ranked individual presented in the higher and a low-ranked individual in the lower position led to quicker identity discrimination than a high-ranked individual in the lower and a low-ranked individual in the higher position. Such a spatial representation of dominance hierarchy in chimpanzees suggests that a natural tendency to systematically map an abstract dimension exists in the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.00932.001.
概念隐喻是语言结构。这样一种隐喻是人类将社会等级以类似金字塔的结构进行的心理表征。高等级个体比低等级个体在更高的位置上被表征。我们表明，社会等级与表征领域之间的概念隐喻映射存在于我们最近的进化近亲——黑猩猩中。要求黑猩猩参与者辨别垂直排列的面部身份。我们发现，呈现个体的等级和在显示屏上的位置对反应潜伏期有调节作用：高等级个体呈现在较高位置且低等级个体呈现在较低位置时，身份辨别比高等级个体呈现在较低位置且低等级个体呈现在较高位置时更快。黑猩猩中这种支配等级的空间表征表明，在人类和黑猩猩的共同祖先中存在一种系统映射抽象维度的自然倾向。DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.00932.001 。
