Wild rhesus monkeys generate causal inferences about possible and impossible physical transformations in the absence of experience
- 2 May 2006
- journal article
- Published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
- Vol. 103 (18), 7181-7185
- https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0601247103
Abstract
Human infants and adults generate causal inferences about the physical world from observations of single, novel events, thereby violating Hume's thesis that spatiotemporal cooccurrence from prior experience drives causal perception in our species. Is this capacity unique or shared with other animals? We address this question by presenting the results of three experiments on free-ranging rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta), focusing specifically on their capacity to generate expectations about the nature of completely unfamiliar physical transformations. By using an expectancy violation looking-time method, each experiment presented subjects with either physically possible or impossible transformations of objects (e.g., a knife, as opposed to a glass of water, appears to cut an apple in half). In both experiments, subjects looked longer when the transformation was impossible than when it was possible. Follow up experiments ruled out that these patterns could be explained by association. These results show that in the absence of training or direct prior experience, rhesus monkeys generate causal inferences from single, novel events, using their knowledge of the physical world to guide such expectations.This publication has 24 references indexed in Scilit:
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