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【bio-news】Jumbo Reflections/大象照镜子
大象照镜子
By Greg Miller
ScienceNOW Daily News
30 October 2006
Few animals can recognize themselves in a mirror. Now elephants have joined the elite group that can, according to a new study. The finding puts the pachyderms in the company of humans, apes, and dolphins, and it may help explain their complex social lives and seemingly altruistic tendencies.
能从镜子里认出自己的动物种类不多，根据一项新的研究结果，大象属于这一高级类群。这项研究结果使得大象与人类、猿、海豚同属一群了，而且这有可能解释它们的群居生活和互助行为。
To test an elephant's ability to recognize itself, a team of researchers examined how three adult female Asian elephants at the Bronx Zoo in New York City reacted to a jumbo-sized mirror in their enclosure. All three showed at least a glimmer of self recognition. One elephant, for example, stood in front of the mirror and used the tip of her trunk to explore her mouth. Chimpanzees use mirrors to do a strikingly similar form of self-investigation, picking at their teeth with their fingers, says team member Joshua Plotnik, a psychology graduate student at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Another animal, named Happy, passed the gold standard "mark test" for self recognition, repeatedly using her trunk to examine a white X the researchers had painted on her face in a location she could only see in the mirror. The team reports its findings online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
为了检测大象是否能够认出自己，在纽约的布朗克斯动物园，一组科学家将一面巨大的镜子设在大象的栅栏里观察3头亚洲象如何反应。3头大象都显示能够认出自己，比如其中一头象站在镜子前用鼻子探自己的嘴。研究小组的成员乔治亚州亚特兰大Emory大学的心理学研究生Joshua Plotnik说黑猩猩在镜子前就是用这种方式表现认出自己的，用它们的手指触摸自己的牙齿。另一头叫Happy的大象通过了认出自己的金标准“标志测试”，即重复用自己的鼻子蹭科学家在它脸上涂的它只能在镜子里才能看到的白色X。这个研究小组本周在《科学》的国家学院学报上发表了他们的报告。
Mirror self-recognition may be part of a more general capacity for self-awareness and empathy, Plotnik and others say. In the wild, elephants console and help other individuals and stand guard over the bodies of their dead (ScienceNOW, 26 October 2005). Such seemingly empathetic behavior probably requires self-awareness, says Gordon Gallup Jr., an evolutionary psychologist at the State University of New York at Albany. "You've got to show self awareness in order to begin to make attributions and inferences about the mental states of others," says Gallup.
Plotnik等人说在镜子里认出自己是自知和移情能力的一部分，在野生环境里，大象会安慰和帮助其它个体、守护它们的尸体，奥尔巴尼纽约州立大学的进化心理学家Gordon Gallup Jr说：“这些移情的行为可能需要自知，因为你首先要有自知才能推测别人在想什么。”
If the findings can be replicated in other elephants, it would be a striking example of convergent evolution, Gallup says. "In evolutionary terms, primates and elephants separated an awfully long time ago," he says, but social intelligence evolved in both lineages. And perhaps in other lineages as well, says Irene Pepperberg, who teaches comparative psychology at Harvard University. Pepperberg has tried previously, without success, to demonstrate mirror self-recognition in parrots, but she says the elephant study is making her rethink those experiments. "It really shows us that so many more species may be capable of these complex abilities if we figure out the right ways of asking the questions," she says.
如果这些发现在别的大学身上也能重复出的话，这将是趋同进化的一个非常有力的证据。“在进化史上，灵长类和大学在很早之前就分开了，” 在哈佛大学教比较心理学的rene Pepperberg 说但二者的社会智力都在进化，别的动物也在进化，Pepperberg以前曾试图证明鹦鹉能够在镜子里认出自己但失败了，她说大象的研究使她又想起了那些实验，“这项研究告诉我们只要方法准确就能证明还有很多动物具有这些复杂的能力。” [标签:content1][标签:content2]
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作者:admin@医学,生命科学 2011-03-12 05:11
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