Zanon Mirko, Lemaire Bastien S, Papeo Liuba, Vallortigara Giorgio
Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Rovereto, Italy.
Institut des Sciences Cognitives - Marc Jeannerod, UMR5229, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) & Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France.
iScience. 2024 Jan 4;27(2):108793. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2024.108793. eCollection 2024 Feb 16.
Sensitivity to face-to-face stimuli configurations, which likely indicates interaction, seems to appear early in infants' development, and recently a preference for face-to-face (vs. other spatial configurations) has been shown to occur in macaque monkeys. It is unknown, however, whether such a preference is acquired through experience or as an evolutionary-given biological predisposition. Here, we exploited a precocial social animal, the domestic chick, as a model system to address this question. Visually naive chicks were tested for their spontaneous preferences for face-to-face vs. back-to-back hen dyads of point-light displays depicting biological motion. We found that female chicks have a spontaneous preference for the facing interactive configuration. Males showed no preference, as expected due to the well-known low social motivation of males in this highly polygynous species. These findings support the idea of an innate and sex-dependent predisposition toward social and interacting stimuli in a vertebrate brain such as that of chicks.
对可能表明互动的面对面刺激配置的敏感性似乎在婴儿发育早期就已出现，最近研究表明猕猴也存在对面对面（相对于其他空间配置）的偏好。然而，尚不清楚这种偏好是通过经验获得的，还是作为一种进化赋予的生物倾向。在此，我们利用一种早熟的群居动物——家鸡作为模型系统来解决这个问题。对视觉上未接触过外界的小鸡进行测试，观察它们对描绘生物运动的点光显示中面对面与背对背母鸡二元组的自发偏好。我们发现雌性小鸡对面对面的互动配置有自发偏好。雄性则没有偏好，这正如预期的那样，因为在这个高度多配偶制的物种中，雄性的社会动机众所周知较低。这些发现支持了这样一种观点，即在脊椎动物如小鸡的大脑中，存在对社交和互动刺激的先天且依赖性别的倾向。
