Inkeller Judit, Knakker Balázs, Kovács Péter, Lendvai Balázs, Hernádi István
Grastyán E. Translational Research Centre, University of Pécs, Pécs, Hungary.
Department of Pharmacology and Drug Safety Research, Gedeon Richter Plc., Budapest, Hungary.
iScience. 2024 Mar 8;27(4):109459. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2024.109459. eCollection 2024 Apr 19.
Future-oriented behavior is regarded as a cornerstone of human cognition. One key phenomenon through which future orientation can be studied is the delay of gratification, when consumption of an immediate reward is withstood to achieve a larger reward later. The delays used in animal delay of gratification paradigms are rather short to be considered relevant for studying human-like future orientation. Here, for the first time, we show that rhesus macaques exhibit human-relevant future orientation downregulating their operant food consumption in anticipation of a nutritionally equivalent but more palatable food with an unprecedentedly long delay of approximately 2.5 h. Importantly, this behavior is not a result of conditioning but intrinsic to the animals. Our results show that the cognitive time horizon of primates, when tested in ecologically valid foraging-like experiments, extends much further into the future than previously considered, opening up new avenues for translational biomedical research.
面向未来的行为被视为人类认知的基石。研究未来取向的一个关键现象是延迟满足，即人们会克制即时奖励的消费，以获得更大的未来奖励。动物延迟满足范式中使用的延迟时间较短，不足以被视为与研究类人未来取向相关。在此，我们首次表明，恒河猴表现出与人类相关的未来取向，它们会在预期一种营养相当但更美味的食物时，下调操作性食物消费，延迟时间长达约2.5小时，这一延迟时间前所未有的长。重要的是，这种行为不是条件作用的结果，而是动物固有的。我们的结果表明，在生态上有效的类似觅食实验中进行测试时，灵长类动物的认知时间跨度比之前认为的要延伸到更远的未来，为转化生物医学研究开辟了新途径。
