KNOWLEDGE BASE OF CHIMPANZEE COMMUNICATION

这项研究的目的是确定黑猩猩能够回忆和报告户外环境中物体的性质和位置的一些信息。四只黑猩猩将接受测试。这种动物非常适合研究回忆记忆。他们已经学会了指向食物和其他物体的任意视觉符号(词汇)，有些人可以在他们遇到这些物体的上下文之外使用这些词汇。以下方法将被用来评估回忆记忆。一只动物看到实验者把一个物体放在户外。后来，在它的室内笼子里，动物可以向不知情的人表明物体的类型、位置、质量和其他属性，以及是谁把它放出来的。试验的提示阶段和反应阶段之间的延迟将长达4周。为了评估健忘，动物一旦报告了一些物体就会被移走，而另一些物体则会被取代。此外，动物在户外围栏中可以在现实生活中解决的任务将被建模，以计算机格式呈现给该个体。动物将操纵操纵杆，使光标击中监视器上的目标。一旦动物开始移动，目标和/或障碍物就会消失。问题是这种动物能记住多少关于目标、地标和障碍物的相对位置的细节，以及它的路线有多有效。动物的路线将在逐个跳跃的基础上与最优路线进行比较。回忆非感官环境特征信息的能力在人类思维、计划和交流中非常重要，这种能力可能对人类的出现和进化发展产生了重大影响，但到目前为止，几乎没有关于非语言动物回忆记忆能力的数据。

The goal of this research is to determine some of the information that chimpanzees can recall and report about the nature and location of objects in outdoor environments. Four chimpanzees will be tested. The animals are uniquely well-suited for studies of recall memory. They have learned arbitrary visual symbols (lexigrams) that refer to foods and other objects, and some can use the lexigrams outside the context in which they encountered the objects. The following method will be used to assess recall memory. An animal sees an experimenter place an object in an outdoor location. Later, in its indoor cage, the animal can indicate to an uninformed person the type, location, quality, and other attributes of the object and who put it out. The delay between the cue-giving and response phases of the trial will range up to 4 weeks. To assess forgetting, some objects will be removed once the animal "reports" them, whereas others will be replaced. In addition, tasks that an animal can solve in real life situations in the outdoor enclosure will be modeled for presentation to that individual in a computer format. Animals will manipulate a joystick to make a cursor hit a target on a monitor. Targets and/or barriers will disappear as soon as the animal begins to move. The questions are how much detail the animal remembers about the relative positions of targets, landmarks, and barriers, and how efficient its route is. The animal's route will be compared on a jump by jump basis to an optimal routing. The ability to recall information about features of the environment not present to the senses is important in human thinking, planning and communication, and this ability presumably had a major influence on the emergence and evolutionary development of humans, but to date there are almost no data on recall memory capabilities in nonverbal animals.