What happened? Do preschool children and capuchin monkeys spontaneously use visual traces to locate a reward?
Autor: | Zeynep Civelek, Amanda M. Seed, Christoph J. Völter |
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Přispěvatelé: | European Research Council, University of St Andrews. School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews. Institute of Behavioural and Neural Sciences, University of St Andrews. Centre for Social Learning & Cognitive Evolution, University of St Andrews. ‘Living Links to Human Evolution’ Research Centre |
Rok vydání: | 2021 |
Předmět: |
BF Psychology
BF 050105 experimental psychology General Biochemistry Genetics and Molecular Biology Neuroscience and Cognition capuchin monkeys Reward preschoolers Animals Cebus 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences 050102 behavioral science & comparative psychology causal inference Research Articles General Environmental Science QL Preschoolers General Immunology and Microbiology 05 social sciences DAS General Medicine QL Zoology Causal inference Capuchin monkeys General Agricultural and Biological Sciences Psychology unseen causes Unseen causes Cognitive psychology |
Zdroj: | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences |
ISSN: | 1471-2954 |
Popis: | This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (grant agreement no. 639072). Edinburgh Zoo's Living Links Research Facility is core supported by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (registered charity no.: SC004064) through funding generated by its visitors, members and supporters. The ability to infer unseen causes from evidence is argued to emerge early in development and to be uniquely human. We explored whether preschoolers and capuchin monkeys could locate a reward based on the physical traces left following a hidden event. Preschoolers and capuchin monkeys were presented with two cups covered with foil. Behind a barrier, an experimenter (E) punctured the foil coverings one at a time, revealing the cups with one cover broken after the first event and both covers broken after the second. One event involved hiding a reward, the other event was performed with a stick (order counterbalanced). Preschoolers and, with additional experience, monkeys could connect the traces to the objects used in the puncturing events to find the reward. Reversing the order of events perturbed the performance of 3-year olds and capuchins, while 4-year-old children performed above chance when the order of events was reversed from the first trial. Capuchins performed significantly better on the ripped foil task than they did on an arbitrary test in which the covers were not ripped but rather replaced with a differently patterned cover. We conclude that by 4 years of age children spontaneously reason backwards from evidence to deduce its cause. Publisher PDF |
Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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