Matsuno Toyomi, Tomonaga Masaki
Department of Economics, Hosei University, Japan; Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, Japan.
Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, Japan.
Cognition. 2017 Jan;158:153-164. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.10.023. Epub 2016 Nov 9.
Extracting a cause-and-effect structure from the physical world is an important demand for animals living in dynamically changing environments. Human perceptual and cognitive mechanisms are known to be sensitive and tuned to detect and interpret such causal structures. In contrast to rigorous investigations of human causal perception, the phylogenetic roots of this perception are not well understood. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the susceptibility of nonhuman animals to mechanical causality by testing whether chimpanzees perceived an illusion called causal capture (Scholl & Nakayama, 2002). Causal capture is a phenomenon in which a type of bistable visual motion of objects is perceived as causal collision due to a bias from a co-occurring causal event. In our experiments, we assessed the susceptibility of perception of a bistable stream/bounce motion event to a co-occurring causal event in chimpanzees. The results show that, similar to in humans, causal "bounce" percepts were significantly increased in chimpanzees with the addition of a task-irrelevant causal bounce event that was synchronously presented. These outcomes suggest that the perceptual mechanisms behind the visual interpretation of causal structures in the environment are evolutionarily shared between human and nonhuman animals.
从物理世界中提取因果结构，是生活在动态变化环境中的动物的一项重要需求。已知人类的感知和认知机制对检测和解释此类因果结构很敏感且经过了相应调整。与对人类因果感知的严格研究形成对比的是，这种感知的系统发生根源尚未得到很好的理解。在本研究中，我们旨在通过测试黑猩猩是否会感知到一种名为因果捕获的错觉（肖尔和中山，2002年），来研究非人类动物对机械因果关系的易感性。因果捕获是一种现象，即由于同时发生的因果事件产生的偏差，物体的一种双稳态视觉运动被感知为因果碰撞。在我们的实验中，我们评估了黑猩猩对双稳态流/反弹运动事件的感知对同时发生的因果事件的易感性。结果表明，与人类相似，在同步呈现一个与任务无关的因果反弹事件时，黑猩猩中因果“反弹”感知显著增加。这些结果表明，人类和非人类动物在对环境中因果结构进行视觉解释背后的感知机制在进化上是共有的。
