据9月4日的《科学》杂志报道说，在Piaget 的某一个有关儿童发育的经典 研究中，一个10个月大小的婴儿在看到一件玩具多次掉落到Box A中之后，她会在Box A中寻找该玩具，尽管她在看到该玩具被放在Box B中之后仍然会这样做。 如今，一组新的实验提示，成年的狗的表现与这些婴儿相似：它们不相信自己的眼睛所看到的事情。 József Topál及其同僚发现，当犬类看到一位驯兽师将某一物体放入Box A后，它们会坚持认为该物体在Box A中，即使它们看到驯兽人将该物体放入Box B中之后其反应依然故我。 但是，由人豢养的狼则不会犯同样的错误，它们会比人或犬更为经常地选择正确的盒子。

为什么会有这种差别？研究人员提出示，婴儿和犬类将这种盒子游戏看作是一种社交学习事件，是一种该物体应该放在哪里的课程。 但是狼没有将这一事件看作是一种教学工具，哪怕它们已经习惯于人类的训练。这提示了在家犬与狼之间存在着进化上的差别。 研究人员还发现了另外一个差别：人类的婴儿对多位“教师”会采取相同的反应，但在狗的训练中，如果驯兽人换了的话，犬类会忘却“在Box A中寻找”的课程，此时它们会相信它们的眼睛所看到的事。 正如Michael Tomasello 和 Juliane Kaminski在一篇相关的Perspective中所讨论的，人类婴儿看来会同等地接受每位成年人所授的课程，而犬类仅仅只对有关即刻处境的人类沟通敏感。

推荐原始出处：

Science 4 September 2009:DOI: 10.1126/science.1176960

Differential Sensitivity to Human Communication in Dogs, Wolves, and Human Infants

József Topál,1,* Gy?rgy Gergely,2 ágnes Erdhegyi,3 Gergely Csibra,2 ádám Miklósi3

Ten-month-old infants persistently search for a hidden object at its initial hiding place even after observing it being hidden at another location. Recent evidence suggests that communicative cues from the experimenter contribute to the emergence of this perseverative search error. We replicated these results with dogs (Canis familiaris), who also commit more search errors in ostensive-communicative (in 75% of the total trials) than in noncommunicative (39%) or nonsocial (17%) hiding contexts. However, comparative investigations suggest that communicative signals serve different functions for dogs and infants, whereas human-reared wolves (Canis lupus) do not show doglike context-dependent differences of search errors. We propose that shared sensitivity to human communicative signals stems from convergent social evolution of the Homo and the Canis genera.

1 Research Institute for Psychology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1132 Budapest, Hungary.
2 Department of Philosophy, Central European University, 1051 Budapest, Hungary.
3 Department of Ethology, E?tv?s University, 1117 Budapest, Hungary.