Truppa Valentina, De Simone Diego A, De Lillo Carlo
Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council of Italy (CNR).
Department of Neuroscience, Psychology and Behaviour, University of Leicester.
J Comp Psychol. 2016 May;130(2):162-73. doi: 10.1037/com0000018. Epub 2016 Apr 14.
Nonhuman primates, differently from humans, are less proficient at processing global properties of visual compound stimuli. It has been suggested that humans preferentially process stimuli globally because this enables a more economical encoding of the stimuli. In this study we assessed the role of short-term memory (STM) in global/local processing by presenting tufted capuchin monkeys with Navon-type hierarchical figures in both simultaneous and delayed matching-to-sample tasks. Capuchins' ability to discriminate hierarchical stimuli was evaluated as a function of increasing delay intervals (0.0, 0.5, 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 sec) between the disappearance of the sample and the presentation of the comparison stimuli. The results showed that recognition accuracy for local features was above chance level with delays of up to 3.0 sec, as previously reported when capuchins were faced with nonhierarchical stimuli. By contrast, the recognition of global configurations was above chance level in simultaneous, 0.0 and 0.5 sec delay conditions but not at delay intervals of 1.0 sec or longer. These findings indicate that capuchins' propensity to process the local properties of visual stimuli can be observed when a delay is interposed between the presentation of sample and comparison stimuli and was not reversed by increasing the delay. Moreover, our results show that capuchins' local propensity was not reversed by increasing stimulus size. Overall, our study confirms crucial differences between human and nonhuman primates and adds new insights into the comparative research on visual grouping functions of these species. (PsycINFO Database Record
与人类不同，非人类灵长类动物在处理视觉复合刺激的全局属性方面不太熟练。有人认为，人类优先全局处理刺激是因为这能更经济地对刺激进行编码。在本研究中，我们通过在同时呈现和延迟匹配样本任务中向簇绒卷尾猴展示纳冯型层次图形，评估了短期记忆（STM）在全局/局部处理中的作用。根据样本消失与比较刺激呈现之间的延迟间隔（0.0、0.5、1.0、2.0和3.0秒）增加，评估卷尾猴区分层次刺激的能力。结果表明，与之前卷尾猴面对非层次刺激时的报道一样，在长达3.0秒的延迟下，局部特征的识别准确率高于机遇水平。相比之下，在同时呈现、0.0和0.5秒延迟条件下，全局构型的识别高于机遇水平，但在1.0秒或更长的延迟间隔下则不然。这些发现表明，当在样本呈现和比较刺激之间插入延迟时，可以观察到卷尾猴处理视觉刺激局部属性的倾向，并且不会因增加延迟而逆转。此外，我们的结果表明，卷尾猴的局部倾向不会因增加刺激大小而逆转。总体而言，我们的研究证实了人类和非人类灵长类动物之间的关键差异，并为这些物种视觉分组功能的比较研究增添了新的见解。（PsycINFO数据库记录）
