Department of Comparative Cognition, Institute of Biology, University of Neuchatel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2022 Jun 15;17(6):e0267574. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0267574. eCollection 2022.
Human communication relies heavily on pragmatic competence. Speech utterances are often ambiguous requiring listeners to use interaction history, shared knowledge, presumed intention and other contextual variables to make inferences about a speaker's meaning. To probe the evolutionary origins of pragmatic competence we tested whether bonobos (Pan paniscus) can make inferences about the type of food available from listening to other group members' food calls. We trained two group members to either prefer blue or pink chow and demonstrated these preferences to observers. A third group member served as an untrained control. In playback experiments, we broadcast the food calls of a trained demonstrator and the untrained group member to investigate whether subjects were able to infer which coloured chow was most likely available, based on the callers' trained food preferences or lack thereof. As predicted, when hearing the untrained group member's calls, subjects did not exhibit a bias, whereas they responded with a significant foraging bias when hearing a trained group member's calls. These findings suggest that bonobos may take into account the idiosyncratic food preferences of others, although subjects probably differed in what they remembered.
人类交流在很大程度上依赖语用能力。言语表达往往具有歧义，需要听话者利用互动历史、共同知识、假定意图和其他上下文变量来推断说话者的意思。为了探究语用能力的进化起源，我们测试了倭黑猩猩（Pan paniscus）是否能够根据其他群体成员的食物叫声推断出可获得的食物类型。我们训练了两名成员来偏爱蓝色或粉色食物，并向观察者展示了这些偏好。第三名成员作为未经训练的对照组。在回放实验中，我们播放了一名受训示教者和一名未经训练的成员的食物叫声，以调查主体是否能够根据呼叫者的训练食物偏好或缺乏来推断哪种颜色的食物最有可能被提供。正如预测的那样，当听到未经训练的成员的叫声时，主体没有表现出偏见，而当听到经过训练的成员的叫声时，他们则表现出明显的觅食偏好。这些发现表明，倭黑猩猩可能会考虑到他人的特殊食物偏好，尽管主体可能在记忆内容上存在差异。
