Metacognition in animals: how do we know that they know?

Abstract

Research on animal metacognition has typically used choice discriminations whose difficulty can be varied. Animals are given some opportunity to escape the discrimination task by emitting a so-called uncertain response. The usual claim is that an animal possesses metacognition if (a) the probability of picking the uncertain response increases with task difficulty, and (b) animals are more accurate on "free-choice" trials -i.e., trials where the uncertain response was available but was not chosen-than on "forced-choice" trials, where the uncertain response is unavailable. We describe a simple behavioral economic model (BEM), based on familiar learning principles, and thus lacking any metacognition construct, which is able to meet both criteria in most of these tasks. We conclude that rather than designing ever more complex experiments to identify "metacognition," a necessarily ill-defined concept, knowledge might better be advanced not by further refining behavioral criteria for the concept, but by the development and testing of theoretical models for the clever behavior that many animals show in these experiments.

Information Seeking in Animals: Metacognition?

“…Thus, as memory weakened with longer retention intervals, a greater proportion of forced tests, but not chosen tests, would be based on poor memory. The findings were clearly in line with the theoretical idea that monkeys chose to take the memory test when they felt certain of the awareness (Heyes, 1994(Heyes, , 1995, theory of mind (Povinelli, 2000), mental time travel (Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007;Zentall, Singer, & Stagner, 2008) and metacognition (Crystal & Foote, 2009, 2011Jozefowiez, Staddon, & Cerutti, 2009). …”

“…Theoretical controversy has arisen recently concerning the use of an uncertainty response as a measure of the state of an animal's knowledge (Crystal & Foote, 2009, 2011Jozefowiez et al, 2009;Smith et al, 2008). Smith et al (2008) have advanced an associative model of metacognition experiments that involves training with stimuli at the ends of a stimulus dimension and tests at the middle of the dimension.…”

Infants ask for help when they know they don’t know

“…In the comparative literature, these adaptive "opt-out" behaviors have been taken as evidence for metacognitive uncertainty monitoring in several species (22,23,27). However, some authors have argued that such behavioral patterns could also be explained by associative or reinforcement learning mechanisms (29,30). For instance, they suggest that difficult trials are simply avoided because individuals learn that the probability of obtaining a reward is lower for those trials (29,30).…”

Getting It Together: Psychological Unity and Deflationary Accounts of Animal Metacognition

“…Those we call Bdeflationists^argue-properly, we believe-that one can explain the animal responses, in the above and related experiments, in simpler, because first-order and associational, terms (Le Pelley 2012;Hampton 2009). The uncertainty-monitoring behaviors, we note, occur only after a period of extensive training during which time the monkey probably comes to associate use of the opt-out response with aversive qualities (for a behavioral economic model of this interpretation, see Jozefowiez, Staddon, and Cerutti 2009). In making their cases, both animal metacognitivists and deflationists typically assume that both folk psychology 7 and Morgan's canon 8 hold, and we do not bring these assumptions into question.…”