Lambert Megan L, Schiestl Martina, Schwing Raoul, Taylor Alex H, Gajdon Gyula K, Slocombe Katie E, Seed Amanda M
Department of Psychology, University of York, York, UK.
Department of Cognitive Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden.
R Soc Open Sci. 2017 Sep 27;4(9):170652. doi: 10.1098/rsos.170652. eCollection 2017 Sep.
A range of non-human animals frequently manipulate and explore objects in their environment, which may enable them to learn about physical properties and potentially form more abstract concepts of properties such as weight and rigidity. Whether animals can apply the information learned during their exploration to solve novel problems, however, and whether they actually change their exploratory behaviour to seek functional information about objects have not been fully explored. We allowed kea () and New Caledonian crows () to explore sets of novel objects both before and after encountering a task in which some of the objects could function as tools. Following this, subjects were given test trials in which they could choose among the objects they had explored to solve a tool-use task. Several individuals from both species performed above chance on these test trials, and only did so after exploring the objects, compared with a control experiment with no prior exploration phase. These results suggest that selection of functional tools may be guided by information acquired during exploration. Neither kea nor crows changed the duration or quality of their exploration after learning that the objects had a functional relevance, suggesting that birds do not adjust their behaviour to explicitly seek this information.
一系列非人类动物经常在其环境中操纵和探索物体，这可能使它们了解物理属性，并有可能形成诸如重量和硬度等属性的更抽象概念。然而，动物是否能应用在探索过程中学到的信息来解决新问题，以及它们是否真的改变探索行为以寻求有关物体的功能信息，尚未得到充分研究。我们让啄羊鹦鹉（kea）和新喀里多尼亚乌鸦（New Caledonian crows）在遇到一些物体可作为工具的任务之前和之后，探索几组新物体。在此之后，对实验对象进行测试试验，在试验中它们可以从自己探索过的物体中进行选择，以解决工具使用任务。与没有前期探索阶段的对照实验相比，两个物种的几只个体在这些测试试验中的表现都高于随机水平，而且只有在探索过物体之后才做到这一点。这些结果表明，功能性工具的选择可能受探索过程中获取的信息指导。在得知物体具有功能相关性后，啄羊鹦鹉和乌鸦都没有改变它们探索的持续时间或质量，这表明鸟类不会调整其行为以明确寻求此信息。
