de Raad A Louise, Hill Russell A
UHI Inverness College, University of the Highlands and Islands, 1 Inverness Campus, Inverness, IV2 5NA, UK.
Department of Anthropology, Durham University, Durham, UK.
Anim Cogn. 2019 May;22(3):397-412. doi: 10.1007/s10071-019-01253-6. Epub 2019 Mar 9.
Many species orient towards specific locations to reach important resources using different cognitive mechanisms. Some of these, such as path integration, are now well understood, but the cognitive orientation mechanisms that underlie movements in non-human primates remain the subject of debate. To investigate whether movements of chacma baboons are more consistent with Euclidean or topological spatial awareness, we investigated whether baboons made repeated use of the same network of pathways and tested three predictions resulting from the hypothesized use of Euclidean and topological spatial awareness. We recorded ranging behaviour of a group of baboons during 234 full days and 137 partial days in the Soutpansberg Mountains, South Africa. Results show that our baboons travelled through a dense network of repeated routes. In navigating this route network, the baboons did not approach travel goals from all directions, but instead approached them from a small number of the same directions, supporting topological spatial awareness. When leaving travel goals, baboons' initial travel direction was significantly different from the direction to the next travel goal, again supporting topological spatial awareness. Although we found that our baboons travelled with similar linearity in the core area as in the periphery of their home range, this did not provide conclusive evidence for the existence of Euclidean spatial awareness, since the baboons could have accumulated a similar knowledge of the periphery as of the core area. Overall, our findings support the hypothesis that our baboons navigate using a topological map.
许多物种会利用不同的认知机制，朝着特定地点行进以获取重要资源。其中一些机制，比如路径整合，如今已被深入了解，但非人类灵长类动物运动背后的认知定向机制仍是一个有争议的话题。为了研究东非狒狒的运动是否更符合欧几里得空间感知或拓扑空间感知，我们调查了狒狒是否反复使用相同的路径网络，并测试了由假设的欧几里得空间感知和拓扑空间感知所产生的三个预测。我们记录了南非苏特潘斯贝格山脉一群狒狒在234个整日和137个半日中的活动范围行为。结果表明，我们研究的狒狒会穿过一个由重复路线构成的密集网络。在这个路线网络中导航时，狒狒并非从各个方向接近行进目标，而是从少数相同的方向接近，这支持了拓扑空间感知。当离开行进目标时，狒狒的初始行进方向与下一个行进目标的方向显著不同，这再次支持了拓扑空间感知。尽管我们发现我们研究的狒狒在其活动范围的核心区域和边缘区域的行进线性相似，但这并没有为欧几里得空间感知的存在提供确凿证据，因为狒狒可能已经积累了与核心区域类似的边缘区域知识。总体而言，我们的研究结果支持了我们研究的狒狒使用拓扑地图进行导航的假设。
