Memory monitoring by animals and humans.

Abstract

The authors asked whether animals and humans would use similarly an uncertain response to escape indeterminate memories. Monkeys and humans performed serial probe recognition tasks that produced differential memory difficulty across serial positions (e.g., primacy and recency effects). Participants were given an escape option that let them avoid any trials they wished and receive a hint to the trial's answer. Across species, across tasks, and even across conspecifics with sharper or duller memories, monkeys and humans used the escape option selectively when more indeterminate memory traces were probed. Their pattern of escaping always mirrored the pattern of their primary memory performance across serial positions. Signal-detection analyses confirm the similarity of the animals' and humans' performances. Optimality analyses assess their efficiency. Several aspects of monkeys' performance suggest the cognitive sophistication of their decisions to escape.

Rhesus monkeys know when they remember

“…Under these contingencies of reinforcement, an animal that knows whether it remembers the recently seen image should choose to take tests when it remembers and decline tests when it has forgotten. The present experiments differ from previous work (13) in that in the present experiments, monkeys were required to decide whether to take or decline the memory test before being presented with the test. Monkeys therefore were forced to base their judgments on the quality of self-generated memory retrieval, unsupported by repeated presentation of the studied image or direct experience with the difficulty of a given test.…”

“…In the present study, recently described behavioral techniques (8,13) were adapted to give monkeys the opportunity to report the presence or absence of memory for recently seen images (Fig. 1).…”

The games psychologists play (and the data they provide)

“…Despite a 50-year literature suggesting that the monkeys would fail to learn such tasks (Rumbaugh, Richardson, Washburn, Savage-Rumbaugh, & Hopkins, 1989), the monkeys did quickly master the tasks. In the years since, the animals have demonstrated the ability to learn and to perform a variety of game-like versions of many of the classic testing paradigms of cognitive, comparative, and developmental psychology and neuropsychology (e.g., Filion, Washburn, & Gulledge, 1996;Hopkins, Washburn, & Rumbaugh, 1990;Smith, Shields, Allendoerfer, & Washburn, 1998;Washburn, 1993Washburn, , 1994Washburn & Astur, 1998;Washburn & Rumbaugh, 1991a, 1991b.…”

Information Seeking in Animals: Metacognition?

“…Experiments reported during the past 15 years have led to the suggestion that metacognition may be found in nonhuman primates (Hampton, 2001;Hampton, Zivin, & Murray, 2004;Kornell et al, 2007;Smith, Shields, Allendoerfer, & Washburn, 1998;Smith, Shields, Schull, & Washburn, 1997;Smith, Shields, & Washburn, 2003) and in a bottlenosed dolphin (Smith, Schull, Strote, McGee, Egnor, & Erb, 1995). These experiments generally require the subject either to make a psychophysical response or to take a memory test.…”