Magnotti John F, Katz Jeffrey S, Wright Anthony A, Kelly Debbie M
Department of Neurosurgery, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA.
Department of Psychology, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, USA.
Biol Lett. 2015 May;11(5):20150148. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2015.0148.
The ability to learn abstract relational concepts is fundamental to higher level cognition. In contrast to item-specific concepts (e.g. pictures containing trees versus pictures containing cars), abstract relational concepts are not bound to particular stimulus features, but instead involve the relationship between stimuli and therefore may be extrapolated to novel stimuli. Previous research investigating the same/different abstract concept has suggested that primates might be specially adapted to extract relations among items and would require fewer exemplars of a rule to learn an abstract concept than non-primate species. We assessed abstract-concept learning in an avian species, Clark's nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana), using a small number of exemplars (eight pairs of the same rule, and 56 pairs of the different rule) identical to that previously used to compare rhesus monkeys, capuchin monkeys and pigeons. Nutcrackers as a group (N = 9) showed more novel stimulus transfer than any previous species tested with this small number of exemplars. Two nutcrackers showed full concept learning and four more showed transfer considerably above chance performance, indicating partial concept learning. These results show that the Clark's nutcracker, a corvid species well known for its amazing feats of spatial memory, learns the same/different abstract concept better than any non-human species (including non-human primates) yet tested on this same task.
学习抽象关系概念的能力是高级认知的基础。与特定项目概念（例如包含树木的图片与包含汽车的图片）不同，抽象关系概念并不局限于特定的刺激特征，而是涉及刺激之间的关系，因此可以外推到新的刺激。先前对相同/不同抽象概念的研究表明，灵长类动物可能特别适合提取项目之间的关系，并且与非灵长类物种相比，学习抽象概念所需的规则示例更少。我们使用与先前用于比较恒河猴、卷尾猴和鸽子的相同数量的少量示例（八对相同规则的示例和56对不同规则的示例），评估了一种鸟类——克拉克星鸦（Nucifraga columbiana）的抽象概念学习能力。作为一个群体的星鸦（N = 9）比以往用这少量示例测试的任何物种都表现出更多的新刺激迁移。两只星鸦表现出完全的概念学习能力，另外四只的迁移表现也大大高于随机水平，表明有部分概念学习能力。这些结果表明，以其惊人的空间记忆能力而闻名的鸦科物种克拉克星鸦，在这项相同任务上比任何已测试的非人类物种（包括非人类灵长类动物）都能更好地学习相同/不同的抽象概念。
