Harvard University, Cambridge, USA.
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA.
Sci Rep. 2020 May 6;10(1):7689. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-64666-1.
Intelligent behavior is shaped by the abilities to store and manipulate information in visual working memory. Although humans and various non-human animals demonstrate similar storage capacities, the evolution of manipulation ability remains relatively unspecified. To what extent are manipulation limits unique to humans versus shared across species? Here, we compare behavioral signatures of manipulation ability demonstrated by human adults and 6-to-8-year-old children with that of an animal separated from humans by over 300 million years of evolution: a Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus). All groups of participants completed a variant of the "Shell Game", which required mentally updating the locations of varying set sizes of occluded objects that swapped places a number of times. The parrot not only demonstrated above-chance performance, but also outperformed children across all conditions. Indeed, the parrot's accuracy was comparable to (and slightly better than) human adults' over 12/14 set-size/number-of-swaps combinations, until four items were manipulated with 3-4 swaps, where performance decreased toward that of 6- to 8-year-olds. These results suggest that manipulation of visual working memory representations is an evolutionarily ancient ability. An important next step in this research program is establishing variability across species, and identifying the evolutionary origins (analogous or homologous) of manipulation mechanisms.
智能行为是由在视觉工作记忆中存储和处理信息的能力塑造的。尽管人类和各种非人类动物都表现出类似的存储能力，但操作能力的进化仍然相对不明确。在多大程度上，操作限制是人类独有的，还是在物种间共享的？在这里，我们将人类成年人和 6 至 8 岁儿童表现出的操作能力的行为特征与一种与人类分离了 3 亿多年的动物进行了比较：一只灰鹦鹉（Psittacus erithacus）。所有组别的参与者都完成了“贝壳游戏”的一个变体，该游戏要求他们在心理上更新隐藏物体的位置，这些物体的位置会交换多次。鹦鹉不仅表现出了高于平均水平的表现，而且在所有条件下都超过了儿童。事实上，鹦鹉的准确率与（略高于）人类成年人在 12/14 个集大小/交换次数组合中的准确率相当，直到用 3-4 次交换来操作四个项目时，其表现才会下降到 6-8 岁儿童的水平。这些结果表明，对视觉工作记忆表示的操作是一种古老的进化能力。该研究项目的下一步重要步骤是确定物种间的变异性，并确定操作机制的进化起源（类似的还是同源的）。
