Research Institute of National Rehabilitation Center for Persons with Disabilities, Tokorozawa, Saitama 359-8555, Japan.
Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, Inuyama, Aichi 484-8506, Japan.
Sci Rep. 2017 Jan 5;7:40033. doi: 10.1038/srep40033.
Humans interpret others' goals based on motion information, and this capacity contributes to our mental reasoning. The present study sought to determine whether Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) perceive goal-directedness in chasing events depicted by two geometric particles. In Experiment 1, two monkeys and adult humans were trained to discriminate between Chasing and Random sequences. We then introduced probe stimuli with various levels of correlation between the particle trajectories to examine whether participants performed the task using higher correlation. Participants chose stimuli with the highest correlations by chance, suggesting that correlations were not the discriminative cue. Experiment 2 examined whether participants focused on particle proximity. Participants differentiated between Chasing and Control sequences; the distance between two particles was identical in both. Results indicated that, like humans, the Japanese macaques did not use physical cues alone to perform the discrimination task and integrated the cues spontaneously. This suggests that goal attribution resulting from motion information is a widespread cognitive phenotype in primate species.
人类根据运动信息来解释他人的目标，这种能力有助于我们进行心理推理。本研究旨在确定日本猕猴（Macaca fuscata）是否能理解由两个几何粒子描绘的追逐事件的目标指向性。在实验 1 中，两只猴子和成年人类被训练区分追逐和随机序列。然后，我们引入了具有不同粒子轨迹相关性水平的探测刺激，以检查参与者是否使用更高的相关性来完成任务。参与者随机选择了相关性最高的刺激，这表明相关性不是区分线索。实验 2 检验了参与者是否关注粒子的接近程度。参与者区分了追逐和控制序列；两个粒子之间的距离在两种情况下是相同的。结果表明，与人类一样，日本猕猴不会仅使用物理线索来执行区分任务，而是自发地整合线索。这表明，源自运动信息的目标归因是灵长类物种中广泛存在的认知表型。
