Division of Psychology, University of Stirling, Stirling FK9 4LA, UK.
Department of Psychology, University of Oviedo, 33003 Asturias, Spain.
Biol Lett. 2022 Aug;18(8):20220253. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2022.0253. Epub 2022 Aug 31.
Being able to abstract relations of similarity is considered one of the hallmarks of human cognition. While previous research has shown that other animals (e.g. primates) can attend to relational similarity, they struggle to focus on object similarity. This is in contrast with humans. And it is precisely the ability to attend to objects that it is argued to make relational reasoning uniquely human. What about invertebrates? Despite earlier studies indicating that bees are capable of learning abstract relationships (e.g. 'same' and 'different'), no research has investigated whether bees can spontaneously attend to relational similarity and whether they can do so when relational matches compete with object matches. To test this, a spatial matching task (with and without competing object matches) previously used with children and great apes was adapted for use with wild-caught bumblebees. When object matches were not present, bumblebees spontaneously used relational similarity. Importantly, when competing object matches were present, bumblebees still focused on relations over objects. These findings indicate that the absence of object bias is also present in invertebrates and suggest that the relational gap between humans and other animals is due to their preference for relations over objects.
能够抽象出相似关系被认为是人类认知的标志之一。虽然之前的研究表明其他动物（例如灵长类动物）能够关注关系相似性，但它们很难关注对象相似性。这与人类形成对比。正是关注对象的能力，使得关系推理具有独特的人类特征。无脊椎动物呢？尽管早期的研究表明蜜蜂能够学习抽象关系（例如“相同”和“不同”），但没有研究调查过蜜蜂是否能够自发地关注关系相似性，以及当关系匹配与对象匹配竞争时，它们是否能够这样做。为了测试这一点，先前用于儿童和大猿类的空间匹配任务（有和没有竞争的对象匹配）被改编为用于野生捕获的熊蜂。当不存在对象匹配时，熊蜂会自发地使用关系相似性。重要的是，当存在竞争的对象匹配时，熊蜂仍然关注关系而不是对象。这些发现表明，无脊椎动物中也存在对象偏见的缺失，并表明人类与其他动物之间的关系差距是由于它们对关系的偏好超过对对象的偏好。
