Investigating information seeking in ravens (Corvus corax)
Investigating information seeking in ravens (Corvus corax)
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DOI：
10.1007/s10071-020-01372-5
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发表时间：
2020-03-21
期刊：
影响因子：
2.7
通讯作者：
Osvath, Mathias
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Lambert, Megan L.;Osvath, Mathias
测量非人类动物对不确定情况的反应被认为可以揭示动物的元认知过程。即，他们是否监控自己的知识状态。例如，当面临觅食任务时，类人猿和猕猴在没有看到食物隐藏位置时会选择性地寻找有关食物位置的信息，而它们已经看到了。我们向乌鸦提出了同样的信息寻找任务，其中将食物隐藏在三个容器之一中，受试者可以观察食物隐藏的位置，通过视觉或听觉线索推断其位置，或者不提供任何信息。我们发现，与几种猿类和猕猴不同，但与卷尾猴相似，乌鸦在每次试验中至少会观察一个管子内部，但通常只有一次，即在诱饵管内，当它们目睹诱饵被诱饵或可以直观地推断出奖励的位置时。相比之下，受试者在没有目睹诱饵或没有获得有关奖励位置的听觉提示的试验中更频繁地观察。讨论了对这些寻找上限水平的几种可能的解释，包括它如何与乌鸦在取回食物储备时面临的不确定性相关。
Measuring the responses of non-human animals to situations of uncertainty is thought to shed light on an animal's metacognitive processes; namely, whether they monitor their own knowledge states. For example, when presented with a foraging task, great apes and macaques selectively seek information about the location of a food item when they have not seen where it was hidden, compared to when they have. We presented this same information seeking task to ravens, in which a food item was hidden in one of three containers, and subjects could either watch where the food was hidden, infer its location through visual or auditory clues, or were given no information. We found that unlike several ape species and macaques, but similar to capuchin monkeys, the ravens looked inside at least one tube on every trial, but typically only once, inside the baited tube, when they had either witnessed it being baited or could visually infer the reward's location. In contrast, subjects looked more often within trials in which they had not witnessed the baiting or were provided with auditory cues about the reward's location. Several potential explanations for these ceiling levels of looking are discussed, including how it may relate to the uncertainty faced by ravens when retrieving food caches.