Christie Stella, Gentner Dedre, Call Josep, Haun Daniel Benjamin Moritz
Department of Psychology, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA 19081, USA.
Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
Curr Biol. 2016 Feb 22;26(4):531-5. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2015.12.054. Epub 2016 Feb 4.
Relational reasoning is a hallmark of sophisticated cognition in humans. Does it exist in other primates? Despite some affirmative answers, there appears to be a wide gap in relational ability between humans and other primates--even other apes. Here, we test one possible explanation for this gap, motivated by developmental research showing that young humans often fail at relational reasoning tasks because they focus on objects instead of relations. When asked, "duck:duckling is like tiger:?," preschool children choose another duckling (object match) rather than a cub. If other apes share this focus on concrete objects, it could undermine their relational reasoning in similar ways. To test this, we compared great apes and 3-year-old humans' relational reasoning on the same spatial mapping task, with and without competing object matches. Without competing object matches, both children and Pan species (chimpanzees and bonobos) spontaneously used relational similarity, albeit children more so. But when object matches were present, only children responded strongly to them. We conclude that the relational gap is not due to great apes' preference for concrete objects. In fact, young humans show greater object focus than nonhuman apes.
关系推理是人类复杂认知的一个标志。它在其他灵长类动物中存在吗？尽管有一些肯定的答案，但人类与其他灵长类动物——甚至其他猿类——在关系能力上似乎存在很大差距。在这里，我们检验了对这种差距的一种可能解释，这一解释是受发展研究的启发，该研究表明，幼儿在关系推理任务中常常失败，因为他们关注的是物体而非关系。当被问到“鸭子：小鸭就像老虎：？”时，学龄前儿童会选择另一只小鸭（物体匹配）而不是幼崽。如果其他猿类也同样关注具体物体，那么这可能会以类似的方式削弱它们的关系推理能力。为了验证这一点，我们在相同的空间映射任务中，比较了类人猿和3岁儿童在有无竞争性物体匹配情况下的关系推理能力。在没有竞争性物体匹配的情况下，儿童和猩猩属物种（黑猩猩和倭黑猩猩）都会自发地利用关系相似性，尽管儿童的表现更明显。但是当存在物体匹配时，只有儿童会对它们做出强烈反应。我们得出结论，关系差距并非由于类人猿对具体物体的偏好。事实上，幼儿比非人类猿类表现出更强的物体关注倾向。
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