Department of Psychology and Life Sciences, Charles University.
Department of Zoology, Charles University.
J Comp Psychol. 2023 Nov;137(4):212-222. doi: 10.1037/com0000347. Epub 2023 Jun 12.
Individual recognition underlies social behaviors in many species and is essential for complex social interactions commonly occurring between conspecifics. Focusing on visual perception, we explored this process in African grey parrots () using the matching-to-sample (MTS) method commonly used in primate research. We used cards made from photographs of familiar conspecific in four consecutive experiments, first testing the ability of our subjects (two male and one female adult) to match the photographs of familiar individuals and then creating modified stimuli cards to determine which visual aspects and features were crucial for successful recognition of a familiar conspecific. All three subjects were able to successfully match different photographs of familiar conspecifics in Experiment 1. Experiments 2-4 showed that modification of the facial area in the photograph had only a weak effect on subjects' success rates in MTS tasks. On the other hand, changes in the plumage color or obscuring of abdominal cues impaired their ability to successfully match conspecifics' photographs in some tasks. This study implies that African grey parrots process visual information holistically. Moreover, the process of individual recognition in this species differs from what we find in primates, including humans, where faces play a crucial role. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
个体识别是许多物种社会行为的基础，对于同种个体之间常见的复杂社会互动至关重要。本研究聚焦于视觉感知，采用灵长类研究中常用的匹配样本（MTS）方法，探索非洲灰鹦鹉（）中的这一过程。我们在四个连续的实验中使用了由同种熟悉个体照片制成的卡片，首先测试了我们的实验对象（两只成年雄性和一只成年雌性）匹配熟悉个体照片的能力，然后创建了修改后的刺激卡片，以确定哪些视觉方面和特征对于成功识别熟悉的同种个体至关重要。在实验 1 中，所有三个被试都能够成功匹配不同的同种熟悉个体的照片。实验 2-4 表明，在照片中对面部区域的修改仅对被试在 MTS 任务中的成功率产生微弱影响。另一方面，羽毛颜色的变化或腹部线索的遮挡会在某些任务中损害它们成功匹配同种个体照片的能力。本研究表明，非洲灰鹦鹉整体处理视觉信息。此外，在这个物种中，个体识别的过程与我们在包括人类在内的灵长类动物中发现的过程不同，在灵长类动物中，面部起着至关重要的作用。
