School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews , St Andrews KY16 9AJ, UK.
Biol Lett. 2024 Jun;20(6):20240051. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2024.0051. Epub 2024 Jun 12.
When chimpanzees search for hidden food, do they realize that their guesses may not be correct? We applied a post-decision wagering paradigm to a simple two-cup search task, varying whether we gave participants visual access to the baiting and then asking after they had chosen one of the cups whether they would prefer a smaller but certain reward instead of their original choice (experiment 1). Results showed that chimpanzees were more likely to accept the smaller reward in occluded than visible conditions. Experiment 2 found the same effect when we blocked visual access but manipulated the number of hiding locations for the food piece, showing that the effect is not owing to representation type. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that when given information about the contents of the unchosen cup, chimpanzees were able to flexibly update their choice behaviour accordingly. These results suggest that language is not a pre-requisite to solving the disjunctive syllogism and provides a valuable contribution to the debate on logical reasoning in non-human animals.
当黑猩猩寻找隐藏的食物时，它们是否意识到自己的猜测可能不正确？我们在一个简单的两杯搜索任务中应用了决策后下注范式，改变了是否让参与者可以看到诱饵的情况，然后在他们选择了其中一个杯子后询问他们是否愿意选择较小但确定的奖励而不是他们原来的选择（实验 1）。结果表明，在隐藏条件下，黑猩猩更有可能接受较小的奖励。实验 2 在我们阻止视觉访问但操纵食物片的隐藏位置数量时发现了相同的效果，表明这种效果不是由于表示类型。实验 3 和 4 表明，当提供有关未选中杯子内容的信息时，黑猩猩能够灵活地相应地更新他们的选择行为。这些结果表明，语言不是解决析取三段论的先决条件，并为非人类动物的逻辑推理辩论提供了有价值的贡献。
