Watanabe Arii, Grodzinski Uri, Clayton Nicola S
Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK,
Anim Cogn. 2014 Jul;17(4):859-67. doi: 10.1007/s10071-013-0719-7. Epub 2013 Dec 10.
When humans mentally reconstruct past events and imagine future scenarios, their subjective experience of mentally time travelling is accompanied by the awareness of doing so. Despite recent popularity of studying episodic memory in animals, such phenomenological consciousness has been extremely difficult to demonstrate without agreed behavioural markers of consciousness in non-linguistic subjects. We presented western scrub-jays (Aphelocoma californica) with a task requiring them to allocate observing time between two peepholes to see food being hidden in either of two compartments, one where observing the hiding location was necessary to later relocate the food, and another where food could easily be found without watching. Jays first separately experienced these consequences of possessing information in each compartment and subsequently, once given a choice, made more looks and spent more time looking into the compartment where information was necessary than into the compartment where it was unnecessary. Thus, the jays can collect information to solve a future problem. Moreover, they can differentiate sources of information according to their potential value and modify behaviour to efficiently collect important, usable information. This is the first evidence of metacognition in a species that passes the behavioural criteria for both retrospective and prospective mental time travel.
当人类在脑海中重构过去的事件并想象未来的情景时，他们在进行心理时间旅行时的主观体验伴随着对这种行为的觉知。尽管最近研究动物情景记忆很流行，但在没有非语言主体意识的公认行为标记的情况下，这种现象学意识极其难以证明。我们给西部灌丛鸦（加州丛鸦）布置了一项任务，要求它们在两个窥视孔之间分配观察时间，以查看食物被藏在两个隔层中的哪一个，其中一个隔层是观察隐藏位置对之后重新找到食物是必要的，另一个隔层是不看也能轻松找到食物的。灌丛鸦首先分别体验了在每个隔层拥有信息的这些后果，随后，一旦有了选择，它们看向有必要获取信息的隔层的次数更多，花费的时间也比看向没必要获取信息的隔层更多。因此，灌丛鸦能够收集信息以解决未来的问题。此外，它们能够根据信息的潜在价值区分信息来源，并调整行为以有效地收集重要的、可用的信息。这是在一个通过回顾性和前瞻性心理时间旅行行为标准的物种中存在元认知的首个证据。
