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科学美国人60秒 乌鸦与类人猿在智力表现上不相上下

时间:2022-07-27 09:20:43

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(单词翻译)

Ravens1 are known for their exceptional intelligence—in fact, they’re sometimes called “flying primates3.”

乌鸦以其非凡的智力而闻名——事实上,有时乌鸦被称为“会飞的灵长类动物”。

“We knew they are very smart, but nobody had really tested this using a big and comprehensive test battery, which also then really enabled us to say, ‘Is their cognitive4 performance similar to those of great apes or not?’”

“我们知道乌鸦非常聪明,但没有人真正用大型和全面的测试来验证这一点,这也让我们开始怀疑,‘它们的认知表现是否与类人猿相似?’”

Simone Pika is a cognitive scientist at the University of Osnabrück in Germany. She and her colleagues wanted to see how ravens would measure up to primates across a wide array of tasks, so they subjected eight ravens to something called the Primate2 Cognition Test Battery—a series of 33 different tasks designed to assess various aspects of intelligence among primates.

西蒙尼·皮卡是德国奥斯纳布吕克大学的一名认知科学家。她和同事们想要看看乌鸦在各种各样的任务中如何达到灵长类动物的水平,所以他们让8只乌鸦参加了一项叫做“灵长类认知测验系列”的测试——一组包含33个不同任务的测试,旨在评估灵长类动物智力的各个方面。

For example, one test is a game of cups you might have seen at a fair—put an object under one of three cups, move the cups around and guess which cup the object is under. Other tasks tested the ravens’ ability to determine cause and effect or to understand different quantities. Peanuts were a popular test item to keep the birds motivated.

例如,一个测试是你可能在游乐场见过的杯子游戏——把一个物体放在三个杯子中的一个下面,移动杯子,然后猜这个物体在哪个杯子下面。其他任务是测试乌鸦判断因果或理解不同数量的能力。花生是一个非常受欢迎,以保持乌鸦的激情。

Overall the researchers found that four-month-old ravens, which you might think of as “teenage” ravens, did just as well on most tasks as adult chimps5 and orangutans—except on tests of spatial6 skills.

总的来说,研究人员发现4个月大的乌鸦——你可能会认为是“青少年”乌鸦——在大多数任务中表现得和成年黑猩猩和猩猩一样好——只是除了空间技能测试。

“And that was a little surprising to us. But we used a test battery that was designed to test primate cognition. And these are tasks which may make sense for human children and great apes. And now we use this for a species which is very different. They are flying; they have beaks7, communicate with beaks, don’t have hands. So I would say here maybe the task we used to test their spatial skills could be improved.”

这让我们有点惊讶。但我们用了一套测试来测试灵长类动物的认知能力。这些任务对人类儿童和类人猿来说可能是有意义的。但现在我们用它来描述一个非常不同的物种。它们飞行;它们有喙,用喙交流,没有手。所以我想说,对于乌鸦空间技能的测试,或许我们可以继续改进。

The results appear in the journal Scientific Reports.

研究结果发表在《科学报告》杂志上。

Kaeli Swift is a behavioral ecologist who studies crows and other corvids at the University of Washington. She says she was impressed by the results—and how comprehensive the tests were—but says it can be hard to assess intelligence by comparing across species.

凯莉·斯威夫特是华盛顿大学研究乌鸦和其他鸦科动物的行为生态学家。她说,自己对测试结果印象深刻,也对测试的综合性印象深刻,但是通过比较不同物种来评估智力是很困难的。

“I’d like to see a shift in our language from comparing ravens to primates, like calling them flying primates, to rethinking how we scale animals—and not putting them on such a linear scale, right, where we’re like, ‘Wow, birds are as smart as apes. That’s amazing. Who would have thought?’ It’s like, well, there’s a bunch of really smart animals, and their natural history informs a lot of their physical and social cognition. And it’s much less linear than the narrative8 we often tell.”

“我希望从比较乌鸦和灵长类动物,看到我们语言的转变,比如称它们为会飞的灵长类动物,重新思考我们如何看待动物,而不是把它们放在这样的线性尺度上,对吧,我们会说,‘哇,鸟类和猿类一样聪明。真不可思议!谁能想到呢?“这就像,嗯,有很多非常聪明的动物,自然历史反映了它们的身体和社会认知能力。”它比我们通常讲述的故事更直接。”

Animal intelligence, she says, is much more complex and variable than we think.

她说,远比我们想象的复杂和多变。


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点击收听单词发音收听单词发音  

1 ravens afa492e2603cd239f272185511eefeb8     
n.低质煤;渡鸦( raven的名词复数 )
参考例句:
  • Wheresoever the carcase is,there will the ravens be gathered together. 哪里有死尸,哪里就有乌鸦麇集。 来自《简明英汉词典》
  • A couple of ravens croaked above our boat. 两只乌鸦在我们小船的上空嘎嘎叫着。 来自辞典例句
2 primate A1YzI     
n.灵长类(目)动物,首席主教;adj.首要的
参考例句:
  • 14 percent of primate species are highly endangered.14%的灵长类物种处于高度濒危状态。
  • The woolly spider monkey is the largest primate in the Americas.绒毛蛛猴是美洲最大的灵长类动物。
3 primates 9536f12c27d026e37c108bd6fc53dbba     
primate的复数
参考例句:
  • Primates are alert, inquisitive animals. 灵长目动物是机灵、好奇的动物。
  • Consciousness or cerebration has been said to have emerged in the evolution of higher primates. 据说意识或思考在较高级灵长类的进化中已出现。
4 cognitive Uqwz0     
adj.认知的,认识的,有感知的
参考例句:
  • As children grow older,their cognitive processes become sharper.孩子们越长越大,他们的认知过程变得更为敏锐。
  • The cognitive psychologist is like the tinker who wants to know how a clock works.认知心理学者倒很像一个需要通晓钟表如何运转的钟表修理匠。
5 chimps 2a09048610e52de775e2fe426c063f06     
(非洲)黑猩猩( chimp的名词复数 )
参考例句:
  • Chimps are too scarce, and too nearly human, to be routinely slaughtered for spare parts. 黑猩猩又太少,也太接近于人类,不可以作为人器官备用件说杀就杀。 来自英汉非文学 - 生命科学 - 医学的第四次革命
  • And as nonprimates, they provoke fewer ethical and safety-related concerns than chimps or baboons. 而且作为非灵长类,就不会产生像用黑猩猩或狒狒那样的伦理和安全方面的顾虑。 来自英汉非文学 - 生命科学 - 医学的第四次革命
6 spatial gvcww     
adj.空间的,占据空间的
参考例句:
  • This part of brain judges the spatial relationship between objects.大脑的这部分判断物体间的空间关系。
  • They said that time is the feeling of spatial displacement.他们说时间是空间位移的感觉。
7 beaks 66bf69cd5b0e1dfb0c97c1245fc4fbab     
n.鸟嘴( beak的名词复数 );鹰钩嘴;尖鼻子;掌权者
参考例句:
  • Baby cockatoos will have black eyes and soft, almost flexible beaks. 雏鸟凤头鹦鹉黑色的眼睛是柔和的,嘴几乎是灵活的。 来自互联网
  • Squid beaks are often found in the stomachs of sperm whales. 经常能在抹香鲸的胃里发现鱿鱼的嘴。 来自互联网
8 narrative CFmxS     
n.叙述,故事;adj.叙事的,故事体的
参考例句:
  • He was a writer of great narrative power.他是一位颇有记述能力的作家。
  • Neither author was very strong on narrative.两个作者都不是很善于讲故事。

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