Department of Cognitive Science, Lund University, Helgonavägen 3, 22100 Lund, Sweden.
Science. 2017 Jul 14;357(6347):202-204. doi: 10.1126/science.aam8138. Epub 2017 Jul 13.
The ability to flexibly plan for events outside of the current sensory scope is at the core of being human and is crucial to our everyday lives and society. Studies on apes have shaped a belief that this ability evolved within the hominid lineage. Corvids, however, have shown evidence of planning their food hoarding, although this has been suggested to reflect a specific caching adaptation rather than domain-general planning. Here, we show that ravens plan for events unrelated to caching-tool-use and bartering-with delays of up to 17 hours, exert self-control, and consider temporal distance to future events. Their performance parallels that seen in apes and suggests that planning evolved independently in corvids, which opens new avenues for the study of cognitive evolution.
灵活规划当前感官范围之外的事件的能力是人类的核心能力，对我们的日常生活和社会至关重要。对猿类的研究形成了一种信念，即这种能力是在人科动物的进化过程中演变而来的。然而，鸦科动物已经表现出了计划它们的食物囤积行为的证据，尽管这被认为反映了一种特定的贮藏适应，而不是一般领域的规划。在这里，我们表明，渡鸦会计划与储存工具使用和物物交换无关的事件，并且可以延迟 17 个小时，它们会进行自我控制，并考虑未来事件的时间距离。它们的表现与猿类相似，这表明规划是在鸦科动物中独立进化的，这为认知进化的研究开辟了新的途径。
