Carvajal Luz, Krupenye Christopher
Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA.
Proc Biol Sci. 2025 Aug;292(2053):20250640. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2025.0640. Epub 2025 Aug 20.
Humans are adept at navigating the social world in part because we flexibly map the locations and identities of agents around us. While field studies suggest primates can track individual conspecifics, controlled experiments are needed to determine the complexity of this capacity and isolate the underlying representations. Across five object-choice tasks, we show that our closest relative, a bonobo (Kanzi), can concurrently track the locations and identities of multiple (specifically, two) hidden agents (Experiment 1), that this capacity deploys mental representations rather than tracking agents' last observed locations (Experiment 2), and that these representations can integrate visual or auditory signatures of identity (Experiment 3). Finally, we show that this bonobo performs similarly on an analogous multiple-object tracking invisible displacement task (Experiments 4-5), consistent with multiple agent- and object-tracking potentially recruiting common representational machinery. This work uncovers the rich representations of the social world that are shared by humans and other apes.
人类善于在社交世界中导航，部分原因是我们能够灵活地描绘周围主体的位置和身份。虽然实地研究表明灵长类动物可以追踪个体同类，但需要通过对照实验来确定这种能力的复杂性，并分离出潜在的表征。在五项物体选择任务中，我们发现我们最近的亲属倭黑猩猩（坎齐）能够同时追踪多个（具体为两个）隐藏主体的位置和身份（实验1），这种能力运用的是心理表征而非追踪主体最后被观察到的位置（实验2），并且这些表征能够整合身份的视觉或听觉特征（实验3）。最后，我们表明这只倭黑猩猩在类似的多物体追踪无形位移任务中表现相似（实验4 - 5），这与多主体和多物体追踪可能调用共同的表征机制相一致。这项研究揭示了人类和其他猿类所共有的对社交世界的丰富表征。
