Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, 6207 Moore Hall, Hanover, NH 03755, United States.
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, 6207 Moore Hall, Hanover, NH 03755, United States; Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), 291 Daehak-ro, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon 34141, South Korea.
Cognition. 2018 Jul;176:53-64. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.02.021. Epub 2018 Mar 20.
Abstraction allows us to discern regularities beyond the specific instances we encounter. It also promotes creative problem-solving by enabling us to consider unconventional problem solutions. However, the mechanisms by which this occurs are not well understood. Because it is often difficult to isolate human high-level cognitive processes, we utilized a nonhuman primate model, in which rhesus monkeys appear to use similar processes to consider an unconventional solution to the difficult reverse-reward problem: i.e., given the choice between a better and worse food option they must select the worse one to receive the better one. After solving this problem with only one specific example-one vs. four half-peanuts-three of four monkeys immediately transferred to novel cases: novel quantities, food items, non-food items, and to the choice between a larger, but inferior vegetable and a smaller, but superior food item (either grape or marshmallow), in which they selected the inferior vegetable to receive the superior option. Thus, we show that nonhuman animals have the capacity to comprehend abstract non-perceptual features, to infer them from one specific case, and to use them to override the natural preference to select the superior option. Critically, we also found that three monkeys had a large learning and performance advantage over the fourth monkey who showed less generalization from the original one and four half-peanuts. This difference suggests that abstraction promoted problem-solving via cascading activation from the two food item options to the relation between them, thus providing access to an initially nonapparent problem solution.
抽象使我们能够发现超越我们所遇到的具体实例的规律。它还通过使我们能够考虑非常规的问题解决方案来促进创造性地解决问题。然而，这种情况发生的机制尚不清楚。由于通常很难隔离人类的高级认知过程，因此我们使用了一种非人类灵长类动物模型，在该模型中，恒河猴似乎使用类似的过程来考虑非常规的解决方案来解决困难的反向奖励问题：即，在有更好和更差的食物选择之间，他们必须选择更差的一种以获得更好的一种。在仅使用一个特定示例（一个与四个半花生）解决了这个问题之后，有三只猴子中的三只立即转移到了新的情况：新的数量、食物物品、非食物物品，以及在较大但较差的蔬菜和较小但较好的食物之间的选择（葡萄或棉花糖），它们选择了较差的蔬菜以获得较好的选择。因此，我们表明，非人类动物有能力理解抽象的非感知特征，从一个特定的例子中推断出来，并利用它们来克服选择较好选项的自然偏好。至关重要的是，我们还发现，三只猴子比第四只猴子具有更大的学习和表现优势，第四只猴子从最初的一个和四个半花生中表现出较少的概括。这种差异表明，抽象通过从两个食物选项到它们之间的关系的级联激活促进了解决问题，从而提供了对最初不明显的问题解决方案的访问。
