Reinforcement and Metacognition

Jozefowiez, Jérémie; Staddon, J. E. R.; Cerutti, Daniel T.

doi:10.3819/ccbr.2009.40007

Cited by 12 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 7 publications

(6 reference statements)

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“…Unfortunately, many of the authors (see the summary of Crystal & Foote, 2009) seem to rule out instances of such embodied knowledge as good cases of metacognition (which they called "private" or "second-order" representations). But some authors (e.g., Jozefowiez, Staddon, & Cerutti, 2009) noted that definition by allusion (to human ratiocination), and by exclusion (of public cues), is a poor way to construct scientific concepts; better to undertake systematic research to understand just what cues are used to control such clever behavior. Perhaps the best way to do that is to construct models that do not require such second-order representations, show how they fail to predict animal behavior, and correct the failure only by activating a meta-cognitive module.…”

Section: Resituating Cognitionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Resituating Cognition.

Killeen¹,

Glenberg²

2010

CCBR

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Cognition, historically localized in one part of the body-the heart in earlier times, the head in latter-involves the action of the organism as a whole: within and dependent upon the details of its physical and social environment. Recent experiments with humans, and classic ones with animals, reveal the essential role played by perceptual and motor acts in shaping the character of thought. Cognition is redefined in terms of Aristotle's four causes: Occasioned by changes in the environment, its substrate is the nervous system-peripheral as well as central; it evolved to guide action, and may be represented as a special kind of automaton. Cognition is repositioned, from a species of mindwork to an activity pervading the body and the locale, without which it would be difficult to maintain, and would have been impossible to achieve.

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Section: Resituating Cognitionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Resituating Cognition.

Killeen¹,

Glenberg²

2010

CCBR

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“…However, many authors argue that learning and associative processes could account for any positive results found (Carruthers 2008;Couchman et al 2010;Hampton 2009;Jozefowiez et al 2009;Smith et al 2008). Criticisms target the paradigm's associated reward contingencies, and the large number of pretraining trials involved.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…The intellectual activity of ''thinking about your own thinking'' (Terrace 2005) was traditionally reserved for Homo sapiens (Hicks 1907) and thought to emerge around the early school years (Cultice et al 1983;Flavell et al 2000;Johnson and Wellman 1980;Kreutzer et al 1975;Lockl and Schneider 2002;Schneider 1999;Wellman 1977) and solidify in adolescence (Schneider 2008). However, a recent surge in inquiry has seen growing evidence of an earlier emergence of metacognition in children (Balcomb and Gerken 2008;Beran et al 2012;Perdue et al 2014), and questions were raised about the metacognitive abilities of nonhuman animals (herein referred to as animals).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and human children (Homo sapiens) know when they are ignorant about the location of food

2015

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Over the last decade, the metacognitive abilities of nonhuman primates and the developmental emergence of metacognition in children have become topics of increasing research interest. In the current study, the performance of three adult chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes; Experiment 1) and forty-four 3.5- and 5.5-year-old human children (Experiment 2) was assessed on a behavioral search paradigm designed to assess metacognition. Subjects either directly observed the baiting of a large reward into one cup among an array of four, or had the baiting occluded from their view. In half of the trials, subjects were also presented with an additional distinctive cup that was always visibly baited with a small reward. This cup allowed subjects the opportunity to escape from making a guess about the location of the bigger reward. All three chimpanzees and both age groups of children selected the escape cup more often when the baiting of the large reward was concealed, compared to when it was visible. This demonstrates that both species can selectively choose a guaranteed smaller reward when they do not know the location of a larger reward and provides insight into the development of metacognition.

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“…In fact, associative registers and reinforcement-history bins are the structural essence of all the formal models that have tried to explain animals’ performances in uncertainty tasks associatively (Jozefowiez et al, 2009b,c; Smith et al, 2008; Staddon et al, 2007). However, we believe that this reinforcement-history mechanism is implausible and unparsimonious, and readers may agree.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cashing out: The decisional flexibility of uncertainty responses in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) and humans (Homo sapiens).

Zakrzewski¹,

Perdue²,

Beran³

et al. 2014

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cogniti

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Researchers are exploring whether animals share with humans something like a metacognitive capacity. Though some results point to human-animal continuities in this domain, they face the dominant criticism that animals’ performances might be associative. A persistent problem is that animal-metacognition paradigms present static environments of risk and reward that may foster inflexible and conditioned responding. Those environments do not challenge animals to show the flexibility in their decision strategies that could indicate an antecedent capacity to metacognition. Accordingly, we tested macaques and humans on an uncertainty-monitoring paradigm in which risk changed dynamically. Participants classified stimuli of different difficulties while also choosing when to use a cashout response to collect the accumulated rewards that would be forfeit on a discrimination error. Macaques and humans flexibly adjusted their decision criteria to achieve appropriate protection against the cost of error that could differ depending on trial difficulty and the number of rewards at risk. In particular, monkeys widened their cashout-response region as their accumulated rewards increased, providing more protection against a more costly error. These findings demonstrate a new continuity between humans’ and animals’ uncertainty systems. They reveal a calibration by macaques of present risk to trial difficulty tolerated. They show that animals’ uncertainty-monitoring and risk-management systems have substantial trial-by-trial flexibility.

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Reinforcement and Metacognition

Cited by 12 publications

References 7 publications

Resituating Cognition.

Resituating Cognition.

Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and human children (Homo sapiens) know when they are ignorant about the location of food

Cashing out: The decisional flexibility of uncertainty responses in rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) and humans (Homo sapiens).

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