Völter Christoph J, Call Josep
School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, St Mary's Quad, South Street, St Andrews, Fife, Scotland, KY16 9JP, UK.
Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103, Leipzig, Germany.
Anim Cogn. 2018 Jul;21(4):493-512. doi: 10.1007/s10071-018-1184-0. Epub 2018 May 2.
There is ongoing debate about the extent to which nonhuman animals, like humans, can go beyond first-order perceptual information to abstract structural information from their environment. To provide more empirical evidence regarding this question, we examined what type of information great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans) gain from optical effects such as shadows and mirror images. In an initial experiment, we investigated whether apes would use mirror images and shadows to locate hidden food. We found that all examined ape species used these cues to find the food. Follow-up experiments showed that apes neither confused these optical effects with the food rewards nor did they merely associate cues with food. First, naïve chimpanzees used the shadow of the hidden food to locate it but they did not learn within the same number of trials to use a perceptually similar rubber patch as indicator of the hidden food reward. Second, apes made use of the mirror images to estimate the distance of the hidden food from their own body. Depending on the distance, apes either pointed into the direction of the food or tried to access the hidden food directly. Third, apes showed some sensitivity to the geometrical relation between mirror orientation and mirrored objects when searching hidden food. Fourth, apes tended to interpret mirror images and pictures of these mirror images differently depending on their prior knowledge. Together, these findings suggest that apes are sensitive to the optical relation between mirror images and shadows and their physical referents.
关于非人类动物在多大程度上能像人类一样超越一阶感知信息，从其环境中提取抽象结构信息，目前仍存在争议。为了提供更多关于这个问题的实证证据，我们研究了大猩猩（黑猩猩、倭黑猩猩和猩猩）从诸如影子和镜像等光学效应中获取何种类型的信息。在最初的实验中，我们调查了猿类是否会利用镜像和影子来定位隐藏的食物。我们发现，所有被研究的猿类物种都利用这些线索找到了食物。后续实验表明，猿类既不会将这些光学效应与食物奖励混淆，也不仅仅是将线索与食物联系起来。首先，天真的黑猩猩利用隐藏食物的影子来定位它，但在相同数量的试验中，它们没有学会将一个在感知上相似的橡胶贴片用作隐藏食物奖励的指示物。其次，猿类利用镜像来估计隐藏食物与它们自身身体的距离。根据距离的不同，猿类要么指向食物的方向，要么试图直接获取隐藏的食物。第三，在寻找隐藏食物时，猿类对镜子方向和镜像物体之间的几何关系表现出一定的敏感性。第四，根据它们的先验知识，猿类倾向于对镜像和这些镜像的图片有不同的解读。总之，这些发现表明猿类对镜像和影子与其物理参照物之间的光学关系很敏感。
