Clayton Nicola S
a Department of Psychology , University of Cambridge , UK.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2015;68(2):209-41. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2014.943673. Epub 2014 Sep 10.
This article reviews some of the recent work on the remarkable cognitive capacities of food-caching corvids. The focus will be on their ability to think about other minds and other times, and tool-using tests of physical problem solving. Research on developmental cognition suggests that young children do not pass similar tests until they are at least four years of age in the case of the social cognition experiments, and eight years of age in the case of the tasks that tap into physical cognition. This developmental trajectory seems surprising. Intuitively, one might have thought that the social and planning tasks required more complex forms of cognitive process, namely Mental Time Travel and Theory of Mind. Perhaps the fact that children pass these tasks earlier than the physical problem-solving tasks is a reflection of cultural influences. Future research will hope to identify these cognitive milestones by starting to develop tasks that might go some way towards understanding the mechanisms underlying these abilities in both children and corvids, to explore similarities and differences in their ways of thinking.
本文回顾了近期一些关于善于贮藏食物的鸦科鸟类非凡认知能力的研究工作。重点将放在它们思考其他思维和其他时间的能力，以及解决物理问题的工具使用测试上。发展认知研究表明，在社会认知实验中，幼儿至少要到四岁才能通过类似测试；而在涉及物理认知的任务中，要到八岁才能通过。这种发展轨迹似乎令人惊讶。直观地说，人们可能会认为社会和规划任务需要更复杂的认知过程形式，即心理时间旅行和心理理论。也许儿童比解决物理问题的任务更早通过这些任务这一事实反映了文化影响。未来的研究希望通过开始开发一些任务来确定这些认知里程碑，这些任务可能有助于在某种程度上理解儿童和鸦科鸟类这些能力背后的机制，探索它们思维方式的异同。
