A nonhuman primate's perception of object relations: experiments on cottontop tamarins, Saguinus oedipus

摘要

Objects in nature often have spatial and functional relationships with other objects. For example, fruit may be connected to tree branches, bushes sometimes function as landmarks for home, and stones are functionally associated with nuts when they are used to crack the nuts open. Although animals may use the spatial and functional relationships between specific objects, it is important for ethologists interested in cognitive mechanisms to ask whether animals understand the spatial relationship between objects in a more general and abstract way. In this experiment, we ask whether a small New World monkey, the cottontop tramarin, is capable of perceiving the abstract relational concept of 'connectedness'.