Animals 'can think about thought' (understand they "don't know" answer)

[papau]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/animalrights/story/0,11917,1098467,00.html

Animals 'can think about thought'

Tim Radford, science editor
Wednesday December 3, 2003
The Guardian

Monkeys can manage mathematics. Dolphins can be decisive. But US psychologists have broken new ground in the animal intelligence challenge. They have proved that animals (monkeys and dolphins)are also smart enough to join the "don't-knows".

It means that animals, like humans, may be capable not just of thinking, but of thinking about thinking, of knowing that they don't know. Psychologists call this "metacognition", evidence of sophisticated cognitive self-awareness. Ordinary mortals know it as "dithering".

A team from the University of Buffalo, New York, the University of Montana and Georgia State University report in the December issue of Behavioural and Brain Sciences that they gave humans, bottlenose dolphins and rhesus monkeys nonverbal memory tasks. Some were hard, some easy.

"The key innovation in this research was to grant animals an 'uncertain' response so they could decline to complete any trials of their choosing," said John David Smith, of the University of Buffalo. "Given this option animals might choose to complete trials when they are confident they know, but decline them when they feel something like uncertainty." <snip>

[roughsatori]

1. meta-cognition seems to be beyond the average person's abilities

Thanks for the post. I will have to do a bit of research on this. It is fascinating.

[GAspnes]

2. as at least one researcher has disputed

there may have been a problem with the experimental method.

When presented with an ambiguous choice, the animals selected "don't know".

The following problem would always be a well-defined one, for which the animal would be rewarded after the correct selection.

It's well known (I think so. And so do a couple of other guys) that primates and other higher-function animals can learn a sequence (answer this way, then that way, for a reward).

It's an intriguing result, but not yet proof.