Uncertain responses by humans and Rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) in a psychophysical same–different task.

Abstract

The authors asked whether animals, like humans, use an uncertain response adaptively to escape indeterminate stimulus relations. Humans and monkeys were placed in a same-different task, known to be challenging for animals. Its difficulty was increased further by reducing the size of the stimulus differences, thereby making many same and different trials difficult to tell apart. Monkeys do escape selectively from these threshold trials, even while coping with 7 absolute stimulus levels concurrently. Monkeys even adjust their response strategies on short time scales according to the local task conditions. Signal-detection and optimality analyses confirm the similarity of humans' and animals' performances. Whereas associative interpretations account poorly for these results, an intuitive uncertainty construct does so easily. The authors discuss the cognitive processes that allow uncertainty's adaptive use and recommend further comparative studies of metacognition.

Not knowing what one knows: A Meaningful failure of metacognition in capuchin monkeys.

“…For example, in Smith et al (1997), it is possible that the UR was used as a proxy categorization response for intermediate densities. To address this, Shields et al (1997) evaluated whether monkeys and humans would use the UR when engaging in a same/different relative discrimination task, where macaques did not classify a specific density level, but chose whether two pixel-density magnitudes were equivalent. This procedure did not allow the monkey (or human) to treat the UR as a categorization response tied to a given class of stimuli (e.g., like an intermediate pixel density).…”

The Highs and Lows of Theoretical Interpretation in Animal-Metacognition Research

“…In no other instance, be it younger versus older human children, or younger versus older human adults, in which the groups' performance profiles correlated at 0.97 (figure 2) [15], would one think to offer qualitatively different lowand high-level interpretations of the behavioural data. Instead, one would naturally interpret similar performances similarly.…”

“…In one case [15], macaques were allowed to make uncertainty responses in a same -different task. A same -different task-testing generalization over variable and novel stimulus contexts-requires some degree of abstraction beyond the absolute stimulus qualities that carry the relation.…”

The Curious Incident of the Capuchins

“…This result highlights the agility and flexibility of uncertainty responses that conditioned responses would never show. Finally, macaques respond uncertain adaptively when facing abstract memory and relational-judgment problems (Hampton, 2001;Kornell et all, 2005;Shields et al, 1997;Smith et al 1998). One sees from this that macaques can make difficulty assessments even about abstract and derived mental representations.…”