Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-1650, USA.
Comparative Cognition, Messerli Research Institute, University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Medical University Vienna, University of Vienna, 1210 Vienna, Austria.
Curr Biol. 2021 Oct 25;31(20):R1377-R1378. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.09.012.
Humans reason not only about actual events (what is), but also about possible events (what could be). Many key operations of human cognition involve the representation of possibilities, including moral judgment, future planning, and causal understanding. But little is known about the evolutionary roots of this kind of thought. Humans' closest relatives, chimpanzees, possess several cognitive abilities that are closely related to reasoning about alternatives: they plan for the future, evaluate other's actions, and reason causally. However, in the first direct test of the ability to consider alternatives, Redshaw and Suddendorf claim that chimpanzees are not able to represent alternative possibilities. Here, using a novel method, we challenge this conclusion: our results suggest that, like human cognition, chimpanzee thought is not limited to what is, but also involves reasoning about what could be the case.
人类不仅可以推理实际事件（是什么），还可以推理可能事件（可能是什么）。人类认知的许多关键操作都涉及可能性的表示，包括道德判断、未来规划和因果理解。但是，对于这种思维的进化根源知之甚少。人类最亲近的亲属——黑猩猩——拥有几种与推理替代方案密切相关的认知能力：它们可以规划未来、评估他人的行为并进行因果推理。然而，在首次直接测试考虑替代方案的能力时，雷德肖和萨登多夫声称黑猩猩无法表示替代可能性。在这里，我们使用一种新方法挑战这一结论：我们的结果表明，与人类认知一样，黑猩猩的思维不仅局限于“是什么”，还涉及对“可能是什么”的推理。
