Cognitive, comparative, and developmental psychologists have long been interested in humans' and animals' ability to respond to abstract relations, as this ability may underlie important capacities like analogical reasoning. Cross-species research has used relational matching-to-sample (RMTS) tasks in which participants try to find stimulus pairs that Bmatch^because they both express the same abstract relation (same or different). Researchers seek to understand the cognitive processes that underlie successful matching performance. In the present RMTS paradigm, the abstract-relational cue was made redundant with a firstorder perceptual cue. Then the perceptual cue faded, requiring participants to transition from a perceptual to a conceptual approach by realizing the task's abstract-relational affordance. We studied participants' ability to make this transition with and without a working-memory load. The concurrent load caused participants to fail to break the perceptual-conceptual barrier unless the load was abandoned. We conclude that finding the conceptual solution depends on reconstruing the task using cognitive processes that are especially reliant on working memory. Our data provide the closest existing look at this cognitive reorganization. They raise important theoretical issues for cross-species comparisons of relational cognition, especially regarding animals' limitations in this domain. Keywords Same-different. Relational judgments. Analogies. Explicit cognition. Comparative cognition Cognitive scientists have long focused on humans' ability to respond to abstract relations like sameness and difference (Wasserman & Young, 2010). James (1890/1950) described relational concepts as the backbone of thinking. Relational concepts underlie humans' analogical reasoning (Hummel & Holyoak, 2003). They mark cognitive-developmental change
To explain animal learning, researchers invoke a dominant associative construct. In contrast, researchers freely acknowledge humans’ explicit-declarative learning capacity. Here, we stretched animals’ learning performance toward the explicit pole of cognition. We tested four macaques (Macaca mulatta) in new discrimination-learning paradigms. Monkeys learned a series of two-choice discrimination tasks. But immediate reinforcement was denied. Instead, reinforcement was lagged—monkeys received feedback for trial N only after seeing and responding to the N + 1-trial stimulus. Theory suggests that lagged reinforcement will eliminate a dominant form of implicit discrimination learning. Yet monkeys still learned successfully. Thus, monkeys may have alternative learning algorithms usable when reinforcement is displaced and reinforcement learning undermined. This learning may, as in humans, take a more explicit form. This and related methods that disable associative learning—fostering a possible transition to explicit cognition—could have empirical utility and theoretical significance within comparative psychology.
Early animal-metacognition researchers singled out simultaneous metacognition paradigms for theoretical criticism, because these paradigms presented concretely rewarded perceptual responses and the metacognitive response simultaneously. This method potentially introduced associative cues into the situation that could confound the interpretation of the metacognitive response. Evaluating this possibility, we compared humans' metacognitive performances in simultaneous and nonsimultaneous (prospective, retrospective) paradigms that were otherwise identical. Results show that the metacognition response in these tasks is not prompted by associative cues arising from the simultaneous task format. To the contrary, the metacognitive response is used more robustly and accurately when it is removed from direct competition with the primary perceptual responses. Thus, early researchers were correct to judge that the nonsimultaneous paradigms tap metacognition more robustly and sensitively. However, this is probably true because the simultaneous paradigm mingles responses adjudicated on two different cognitiveprocessing levels. And, in that case, the metacognitive response can be outcompeted and suppressed by the salient presence of primary, concretely rewarded perceptual responses.
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