Agent Preference in Chasing Interactions in Guinea Baboons ( Papio papio ): Uncovering the Roots of Subject–Object Order in Language
研究通过几内亚狒狒对追逐动画中颜色变化的检测实验，发现它们对追逐者（主体）的反应快于被追逐者（客体），表明主体偏好可能是一种进化上古老的机制，为人类语言中主语优先的倾向提供了生物学基础。
Languages tend to describe “who is doing what to whom” by placing subjects before objects. This may reflect a bias for agents in event cognition: Agents capture more attention than patients in human adults and infants. We investigated whether this agent preference is shared with nonhuman animals. We presented Guinea baboons ( Papio papio; N = 13) with a change-detection paradigm on chasing animations. The baboons were trained to respond to a color change that was applied to either the chaser/agent or the chasee/patient. They were faster to detect a change to the chaser than to the chasee, which could not be explained by low-level features in our stimuli such as the chaser’s motion pattern or position. An agent preference may be an evolutionarily old mechanism that is shared between humans and other primates that could have become externalized in language as a tendency to place the subject first.