Jones Benjamin, Call Josep
School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, KY16 9AJ, UK.
Anim Cogn. 2025 Jan 2;28(1):3. doi: 10.1007/s10071-024-01927-w.
Chimpanzees excel at inference tasks which require that they search for a single food item from partial information. Yet, when presented with 2-item tasks which test the same inference operation, chimpanzees show a consistent breakdown in performance. Here we test a diverse zoo-housed cohort (n = 24) comprising all 4 great ape species under the classic 4-cup 2-item task, previously administered to children and chimpanzees, and a modified task administered to baboons. The aim of this study is to delineate whether the divergent results reported from the literature are taxonomic differences or artefacts of their methodologies, while extending the literature to cover the remaining great ape species. We find that apes adaptively adjust their choice behaviour in both variants of the task, but that they perform better in trials where the information provided rules out a location rather than removes one of the food items. In a second experiment involving those subjects who passed the first, along with a group of naïve subjects, we test whether subjects were able to apply the logical operation selectively by including control trials where the correct response is reversed. Performance in standard trials breaks down with the addition of control trials, meaning that if apes did solve the first experiment logically, they are not capable of applying that logic flexibly. Considering this finding, we conclude that a 4-cup 2-item task may not be a suitable test of logical reasoning in great apes.
黑猩猩擅长推理任务，这类任务要求它们根据部分信息寻找单一食物。然而，当面对测试相同推理操作的两项任务时，黑猩猩的表现始终不佳。在此，我们对一个多样化的圈养动物群体（n = 24）进行了测试，该群体包括所有4种大型猿类，测试采用经典的4杯两项任务（此前曾用于测试儿童和黑猩猩）以及一项修改后的任务（用于测试狒狒）。本研究的目的是确定文献中报道的不同结果是分类学差异还是其方法的人为产物，同时扩展文献以涵盖其余大型猿类物种。我们发现，猿类在这两种任务变体中都能适应性地调整其选择行为，但在提供的信息排除了一个位置而非移除其中一个食物项的试验中表现更好。在第二项实验中，我们让通过了第一项实验的受试者以及一组未经过训练的受试者参与，通过设置正确反应相反的对照试验来测试受试者是否能够有选择地应用逻辑操作。随着对照试验的增加，标准试验中的表现变差，这意味着如果猿类确实在第一项实验中进行了逻辑推理，它们也无法灵活应用该逻辑。基于这一发现，我们得出结论，4杯两项任务可能不是测试大型猿类逻辑推理的合适方法。
