Range Friederike, Bugnyar Thomas, Kotrschal Kurt
Konrad Lorenz Research Station, 4645 Gruenau 11, Austria; Department of Neurobiology and Cognition Research, Universität Wien, Althanstrasse 14, 1091 Vienna, Austria.
Konrad Lorenz Research Station, 4645 Gruenau 11, Austria.
Acta Ethol. 2008 Apr 1;11(1):34-41. doi: 10.1007/s10211-008-0039-0.
Recent studies suggest the existence of primate-like cognitive abilities in corvids. Although the learning abilities of corvids in comparison to other species have been investigated before, little is known on how corvids perform on simple discrimination tasks if tested in experimental settings comparable to those that have been used for studying complex cognitive abilities. In this study, we tested a captive group of 12 ravens () on four discrimination problems and their reversals. In contrast to other studies investigating learning abilities, our ravens were not food deprived and participation in experiments was voluntary. This preliminary study showed that all ravens successfully solved feature and position discriminations and several of the ravens could solve new tasks in a few trials, making very few mistakes.
最近的研究表明鸦科动物具有类似灵长类动物的认知能力。尽管之前已经对鸦科动物与其他物种相比的学习能力进行了研究,但对于在与用于研究复杂认知能力的实验环境相当的条件下进行测试时,鸦科动物在简单辨别任务中的表现知之甚少。在本研究中,我们对一组12只圈养的渡鸦进行了四项辨别问题及其反转测试。与其他研究学习能力的研究不同,我们的渡鸦没有被剥夺食物,参与实验是自愿的。这项初步研究表明,所有渡鸦都成功解决了特征和位置辨别问题,并且有几只渡鸦能够在几次试验中解决新任务,犯错极少。