Premack D, Premack A J
Laboratoire de Psycho-Biologie du Développement, CNRS, Paris, France.
Cognition. 1994 Apr-Jun;50(1-3):347-62. doi: 10.1016/0010-0277(94)90035-3.
We compare three levels of causal understanding in chimpanzees and children: (1) causal reasoning, (2) labelling the components (actor, object, and instrument) of a causal sequence, and (3) choosing the correct alternative for an incomplete representation of a causal sequence. We present two tests of causal reasoning, the first requiring chimpanzees to read and use as evidence the emotional state of a conspecific. Despite registering the emotion, they failed to use it as evidence. The second test, comparing children and chimpanzees, required them to infer the location of food eaten by a trainer. Children and, to a lesser extent, chimpanzees succeeded. When given information showing the inference to be unsound--physically impossible--4-year-old children abandoned the inference but younger children and chimpanzees did not. Children and chimpanzees are both capable of labelling causal sequences and completing incomplete representations of them. The chimpanzee Sarah labelled the components of a causal sequence, and completed incomplete representations of actions involving multiple transformations. We conclude the article with a general discussion of the concept of cause, suggesting that the concept evolved far earlier in the psychological domain than in the physical.
（1）因果推理；（2）对因果序列的组成部分（施动者、对象和工具）进行标注；（3）为不完整的因果序列表征选择正确的选项。我们进行了两项因果推理测试，第一项测试要求黑猩猩将同种个体的情绪状态作为证据来解读和运用。尽管它们识别出了情绪，但并未将其用作证据。第二项测试对儿童和黑猩猩进行了比较，要求它们推断训练者吃掉食物的位置。儿童成功做到了，黑猩猩在一定程度上也成功了。当给出的信息表明该推断不合理——不符合物理规律——时，4岁儿童放弃了该推断，但年龄更小的儿童和黑猩猩没有。儿童和黑猩猩都能够对因果序列进行标注，并完成其不完整的表征。黑猩猩莎拉对因果序列的组成部分进行了标注，并完成了涉及多次转变的行为的不完整表征。我们在文章结尾对因果概念进行了全面讨论，认为该概念在心理领域的演化要比在物理领域早得多。
