Metacognition in animals

Metacognition in wild Japanese macaques: cost and stakes influencing information-seeking behavior

Metacognition allows us to evaluate memories and knowledge, thus enabling us to distinguish between what we know and what we do not. Studies have shown that species other than humans may possess similar abilities. However, the number of species tested was limited. Testing ten free-ranging Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) on a task in which they had to find food hidden inside one of the four opaque tubes, we investigated whether these subjects would seek information when needed. The monkeys could look inside the tubes before selecting one. We varied three parameters: the baiting process, the cost that monkeys had to pay to look inside the tubes, and the reward at stake. We assessed whether and how these parameters would affect the monkeys' tendency to look inside the tube before selecting one. When they were not shown which tube contained the reward, nine monkeys looked significantly more frequently in at least one condition. Half of them tended to reduce their looks when the cost was high, but only when they already knew the location of the reward. When a high-quality reward was at stake, four monkeys tended to look more inside the tubes, even though they already knew the reward's location. Our results are consistent with those of rhesus macaques, suggesting that metacognitive-like abilities may be shared by Cercopithecidae, and that, at least some monkeys may be aware of their lack of knowledge.

Rats adaptively seek information to accommodate a lack of information

Metacognition is the ability to adaptively control one's behavior by referring to one's own cognitive processes. It is thought to contribute to learning in situations where there is insufficient information available from the environment. Information-seeking behavior is a type of metacognition in which one confirms the necessary information only when one does not have the necessary and sufficient information to accomplish a task. The rats were required to respond to a nose poke hole on one wall of the experimental box for a certain period of time and then move to the opposite side at a specific time. Unfortunately, they were unable to match the timing when responding to the hole on one side. Therefore, they had to look back and confirm that now was the right time. The results obtained by analyzing these looking-back movements using a motion capture system showed that this behavior occurred frequently and rapidly in situations of insufficient information, such as in the early stages of learning, but was hardly observed and became slower as learning progressed. These results suggest that rats can adjust their behavior in response to a lack of information more flexibly than previously assumed.

Evolution of metamemory based on self-reference to own memory in artificial neural network with neuromodulation

The ability of humans to self-monitor and control their memory processes is called metamemory and has been widely studied as a component of metacognition in cognitive psychology. Metamemory in non-human animals has also been investigated in recent years, although it had been regarded as a truly unique characteristic of human memory. We attempt to evolve artificial neural networks with neuromodulation, which have a metamemory function. Our constructive approach is expected to contribute, by introducing a novel dimension of evolutionary plausibility, to the discussion of animal experiments to detect metamemory. In this study, we demonstrate the evolution of neural networks that have a metamemory function based on the self-reference of memory, including the analysis of the evolved mechanism of metamemory. In addition, we discuss the similarity between the structure of the evolved neural network and the metamemory model defined by Nelson and Narens.

Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence? A discussion

Roberts (2020, Learning & Behavior, 48[2], 191-192) discussed research claiming honeybees can do arithmetic. Some readers of this research might regard such claims as unlikely. The present authors used this example as a basis for a debate on the criterion that ought to be used for publication of results or conclusions that could be viewed as unlikely by a significant number of readers, editors, or reviewers.

Pigeons acquire the 1-back task: Implications for implicit versus explicit learning?

In humans, a distinction can be made between implicit or procedural learning (involving stimulus-response associations) and explicit or declarative learning (involving verbalizable rules) that is relatively easy to make in verbal humans. According to several investigators, it is also possible to make such a distinction in nonverbal animals. One way is by training them on a conditional discrimination task (e.g., matching-to-sample) in which reinforcement for correct choice on the current trial is delayed until after a choice is made on the next trial - a method known as the 1-back procedure. According to Smith, Jackson, and Church ( Journal of Comparative Psychology, 134(4), 423-434, 2020), the delay between the sample-correct-comparison response on one trial and reinforcement obtained on the next trial is too long for implicit (associative) learning. Thus, according to this theory, learning must be explicit. In the present experiments we trained pigeons using the 1-back procedure. In Experiment 1, pigeons were trained on red/green 1-back matching using a non-correction procedure. Some of the pigeons showed significant learning. When a correction procedure was introduced, all the pigeons showed evidence of learning. In Experiment 2, new pigeons learned red/green 1-back matching with the correction procedure. In Experiment 3, new pigeons learned symbolic 1-back matching with yellow and blue conditional stimuli and red/green choice stimuli. Thus, pigeons can learn using 1-back reinforcement. Although it would appear that the pigeons acquired this task explicitly, we believe that this procedure does not adequately distinguish between implicit and explicit learning.

The Cognitive Architecture of Uncertainty

The authors consider theory in the animal-metacognition literature. Theoretical interpretation was long dominated by associative descriptions, as illustrated in the 2009 special issue. We suggest that this approach risks a self-limiting understanding of animal mind, and an imprecise understanding of the cognitive requirements inherent in metacognition tasks. In fact, some tasks self-entail the need for higher-level decision-making processes, processes that-in humans-we would call explicit, declarative, and conscious. These points are illustrated using the inaugural study on dolphin metacognition. We urge researchers to turn more toward illuminating the cognitive architecture of capacities like metacognition, including illuminating the depth, and structure, the learning/memory systems, the cognitive levels, and the declarative awareness possibly present in animals' minds. The empirical development of this literature demonstrates that researchers are now prepared to do so. This study can produce strong synergies across the allied fields of biopsychology, comparative and cognitive psychology, and neuroscience.

Slow Progress with the Most Widely Used Animal Model: Ten Years of Metacognition Research in Rats, 2009-2019

Until recently, demonstrations of metacognition in primates have been frequent and robust, while in rodents they have been few and equivocal. However, the past few years have seen a change in this trend with the introduction of novel methods to determine whether metacognitive responding is governed by internal or external sources of stimulus control in rats. Such studies suggest that like primates, rats can indeed use internal assessment of memory strengths to guide metacognitive responding. Strong behavioral paradigms suitable for rodents support the development of easily-accessible animal models for the neurobiology of metamemory and translational studies on diseases of memory. They also allow for a more complete comparative study of the evolution of metacognition, as the presence of this ability in rodents would suggest that metacognition evolved ~80 rather than ~25 million years ago.

Metacognition in dogs: Do dogs know they could be wrong?

In the current study, we investigated the question of whether dogs were sensitive to the information that they themselves had or had not acquired. For this purpose, we conducted three consecutive experiments in which dogs had to find a reward that was hidden behind one of two V-shaped fences with a gap at the point of the V. This setup allowed us to distinguish between selecting one of the fences by walking around it and seeking additional information by checking through the gap in the fence. We varied whether dogs had visual access to the baiting procedure or not. In addition, we manipulated the type and quality of reward as well as the time delay between baiting and choosing to analyze if the dogs' searching behavior was affected. Our results were partly consistent with the findings of Call (Animal Cognition, 13 (5), 689-700, 2010) with great apes, on whose findings we based our experiments. We found that dogs checked more often through the corner of the V-shaped fence when they had not seen where the reward was hidden. Interestingly, dogs rewarded with toys selected the correct fence more often than dogs rewarded with food. Even though dogs' performance was not affected by the food quality condition, dogs were significantly faster in fetching a high-quality food reward as opposed to a low-quality food reward. When testing whether forgetting and checking would increase as a function of delay, we found that although dogs slightly decreased in their success in finding the food when time delays were longer, they were not more likely to check before choosing. We show that - similar to apes - dogs seek additional information in uncertain situations, but their behavior in uncertain situations is less flexible compared to great apes.

The interplay between uncertainty monitoring and working memory: Can metacognition become automatic?

The uncertainty response has grounded the study of metacognition in nonhuman animals. Recent research has explored the processes supporting uncertainty monitoring in monkeys. It has revealed that uncertainty responding, in contrast to perceptual responding, depends on significant working memory resources. The aim of the present study was to expand this research by examining whether uncertainty monitoring is also working memory demanding in humans. To explore this issue, human participants were tested with or without a cognitive load on a psychophysical discrimination task that included either an uncertainty response (allowing the participant to decline difficult trials) or a middle-perceptual response (labeling the same intermediate trial levels). The results demonstrated that cognitive load reduced uncertainty responding, but increased middle responding. However, this dissociation between uncertainty and middle responding was only observed when participants either lacked training or had very little training with the uncertainty response. If more training was provided, the effect of load was small. These results suggest that uncertainty responding is resource demanding, but with sufficient training, human participants can respond to uncertainty either by using minimal working memory resources or by effectively sharing resources. These results are discussed in relation to the literature on animal and human metacognition.

Primate cognition: attention, episodic memory, prospective memory, self-control, and metacognition as examples of cognitive control in nonhuman primates

Primate Cognition is the study of cognitive processes, which represent internal mental processes involved in discriminations, decisions, and behaviors of humans and other primate species. Cognitive control involves executive and regulatory processes that allocate attention, manipulate and evaluate available information (and, when necessary, seek additional information), remember past experiences to plan future behaviors, and deal with distraction and impulsivity when they are threats to goal achievement. Areas of research that relate to cognitive control as it is assessed across species include executive attention, episodic memory, prospective memory, metacognition, and self-control. Executive attention refers to the ability to control what sensory stimuli one attends to and how one regulates responses to those stimuli, especially in cases of conflict. Episodic memory refers to memory for personally experienced, autobiographical events. Prospective memory refers to the formation and implementation of future-intended actions, such as remembering what needs to be done later. Metacognition consists of control and monitoring processes that allow individuals to assess what information they have and what information they still need, and then if necessary to seek information. Self-control is a regulatory process whereby individuals forego more immediate or easier to obtain rewards for more delayed or harder to obtain rewards that are objectively more valuable. The behavioral complexity shown by nonhuman primates when given tests to assess these capacities indicates psychological continuities with human cognitive control capacities. However, more research is needed to clarify the proper interpretation of these behaviors with regard to possible cognitive constructs that may underlie such behaviors. WIREs Cogn Sci 2016, 7:294-316. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1397 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Ants adjust their pheromone deposition to a changing environment and their probability of making errors

Animals must contend with an ever-changing environment. Social animals, especially eusocial insects such as ants and bees, rely heavily on communication for their success. However, in a changing environment, communicated information can become rapidly outdated. This is a particular problem for pheromone trail using ants, as once deposited pheromones cannot be removed. Here, we study the response of ant foragers to an environmental change. Ants were trained to one feeder location, and the feeder was then moved to a different location. We found that ants responded to an environmental change by strongly upregulating pheromone deposition immediately after experiencing the change. This may help maintain the colony's foraging flexibility, and allow multiple food locations to be exploited simultaneously. Our treatment also caused uncertainty in the foragers, by making their memories less reliable. Ants which had made an error but eventually found the food source upregulated pheromone deposition when returning to the nest. Intriguingly, ants on their way towards the food source downregulated pheromone deposition if they were going to make an error. This may suggest that individual ants can measure the reliability of their own memories and respond appropriately.

The Effect of Trail Pheromone and Path Confinement on Learning of Complex Routes in the Ant Lasius niger

Route learning is key to the survival of many central place foragers, such as bees and many ants. For ants which lay pheromone trails, the presence of a trail may act as an important source of information about whether an error has been made. The presence of trail pheromone has been demonstrated to support route learning, and the effect of pheromones on route choice have been reported to persist even after the pheromones have been removed. This could be explained in two ways: the pheromone may constrain the ants onto the correct route, thus preventing errors and aiding learning. Alternatively, the pheromones may act as a ‘reassurance’, signalling that the learner is on the right path and that learning the path is worthwhile. Here, we disentangle pheromone presence from route confinement in order to test these hypotheses, using the ant Lasius niger as a model. Unexpectedly, we did not find any evidence that pheromones support route learning. Indeed, there was no evidence that ants confined to the correct route learned at all. Thus, while we cannot support the ‘reassurance’ hypothesis, we can rule out the ‘confinement’ hypothesis. Other findings, such as a reduction in pheromone deposition in the presence of trail pheromones, are remarkably consistent with previous experiments. As previously reported, ants which make errors on their outward journey upregulate pheromone deposition on their return. Surprisingly, ants which would go on to make an error down-regulate pheromone deposition on their outward journey, hinting at a capacity for ants to gauge the quality of their own memories.

Where is the skepticism in animal metacognition?

The comparative analysis of metacognition may answer fundamental questions about the evolution of cognition. Although a substantial amount of research has been directed toward this goal in the last two decades, the recent development of quantitative nonmetacognition models has raised questions about the existence of metacognition in nonhumans. Kornell (2014, pp. 143-149) proposes that advances in animal metacognition may be made by following emerging trends in human metacognition research, namely that animal metacognition may take the form of drawing inferences from metacognitive cues without directly assessing the strength of memories. A problem with this approach is noted. Because the metacognitive status of certainty judgments in animals is at the center of the dispute in the field, demonstrations of the inferential view would not provide evidence that putative metacognitive cues are indeed based on metacognition. I argue that any preparation that claims to tap into metacognition needs to be tested against leading nonmetacognition hypotheses such as Le Pelley's (2012) reinforcement-learning model. Progress in animal metacognition will come from the development of new assessment techniques that offer predictions contrary to nonmetacognition hypotheses. Animal metacognition will advance by applying skepticism about methods and interpretation while letting the animals (and their data) settle the debate.

The misbehaviour of a metacognitive monkey

Metacognition, the monitoring of one's own mental states, is a fundamental aspect of human intellect. Despite tests in nonhuman animals suggestive of uncertainty monitoring, some authors interpret these results solely in terms of primitive psychological mechanisms and reinforcement regimes, where "reinforcement" is invariably considered to be the delivery and consumption of earned food rewards. Surprisingly, few studies have detailed the trial-by-trial behaviour of animals engaged in such tasks. Here we report ethology-based observations on a rhesus monkey completing sparse-dense discrimination problems, and given the option of escaping trials (i.e., responding "uncertain") at its own choosing. Uncertainty responses were generally made on trials of high objective difficulty, and were characterized by long latencies before beginning visible trials, long times taken for response, and, even after controlling for difficulty, high degrees of wavering during response. Incorrect responses were also common in trials of high objective difficulty, but were characterized by low degrees of wavering. This speaks to the likely adaptive nature of "hesitation," and is inconsistent with models which argue or predict implicit, inflexible information-seeking or "alternative option" behaviours whenever challenging problems present themselves, Confounding models which suggest that nonhuman behaviour in metacognition tasks is driven solely by food delivery/consumption, the monkey was also observed allowing pellets to accumulate and consuming them during and after trials of all response/outcome categories (i.e., whether correct, incorrect, or escaped). This study thus bolsters previous findings that rhesus monkey behaviour in metacognition tasks is in some respects disassociated from mere food delivery/consumption, or even the avoidance of punishment. These and other observations fit well with the evolutionary status and natural proclivities of rhesus monkeys, but weaken arguments that responses in such tests are solely associated with associative mechanisms, and instead suggest more derived and controlled cognitive processing. The latter interpretation appears particularly parsimonious given the neurological adaptations of primates, as well as their highly flexible social and ecological behaviour.

Honey bees selectively avoid difficult choices

Human decision-making strategies are strongly influenced by an awareness of certainty or uncertainty (a form of metacognition) to increase the chances of making a right choice. Humans seek more information and defer choosing when they realize they have insufficient information to make an accurate decision, but whether animals are aware of uncertainty is currently highly contentious. To explore this issue, we examined how honey bees (Apis mellifera) responded to a visual discrimination task that varied in difficulty between trials. Free-flying bees were rewarded for a correct choice, punished for an incorrect choice, or could avoid choosing by exiting the trial (opting out). Bees opted out more often on difficult trials, and opting out improved their proportion of successful trials. Bees could also transfer the concept of opting out to a novel task. Our data show that bees selectively avoid difficult tasks they lack the information to solve. This finding has been considered as evidence that nonhuman animals can assess the certainty of a predicted outcome, and bees' performance was comparable to that of primates in a similar paradigm. We discuss whether these behavioral results prove bees react to uncertainty or whether associative mechanisms can explain such findings. To better frame metacognition as an issue for neurobiological investigation, we propose a neurobiological hypothesis of uncertainty monitoring based on the known circuitry of the honey bee brain.

Executive-attentional uncertainty responses by rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta)

The uncertainty response has been influential in studies of human perception, and it is crucial in the growing research literature that explores animal metacognition. However, the uncertainty response's interpretation is still sharply debated. The authors sought to clarify this interpretation using the dissociative technique of cognitive loads imposed on ongoing discrimination performance. Four macaques (Macaca mulatta) performed a sparse-dense discrimination within which an uncertainty response let them decline difficult trials or a middle response let them identify middle stimuli. Concurrent memory tasks were occasionally overlain on ongoing discrimination performance. The concurrent tasks disrupted macaques' uncertainty responses far more than their sparse, middle, or dense discrimination responses. This dissociation suggests that the uncertainty response is a higher level decisional response that is particularly dependent on working memory and attentional resources. This is consistent with the theoretical possibility that the uncertainty response is an elemental behavioral index of uncertainty monitoring or metacognition.

Language-trained chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) name what they have seen but look first at what they have not seen

Metacognition can be defined as knowing what one knows, and the question of whether nonhuman animals are metacognitive has driven an intense debate. We tested 3 language-trained chimpanzees in an information-seeking task in which the identity of a food item was the critical piece of information needed to obtain the food. The chimpanzees could either report the identity of the food immediately or first check a container in which the food had been hidden. In two experiments, the chimpanzees were significantly more likely to visit the container first on trials in which they could not know its contents but were more likely to just name the food item without looking into the container on trials in which they had seen its contents. Thus, chimpanzees showed efficient information-seeking behavior that suggested they knew what they had or had not already seen when it was time to name a hidden item.

Uncertainty monitoring by young children in a computerized task

Adult humans show sophisticated metacognitive abilities, including the ability to monitor uncertainty. Unfortunately, most measures of uncertainty monitoring are limited to use with adults due to their general complexity and dependence on explicit verbalization. However, recent research with nonhuman animals has successfully developed measures of uncertainty monitoring that are simple and do not require explicit verbalization. The purpose of this study was to investigate metacognition in young children using uncertainty monitoring tests developed for nonhumans. Children judged whether stimuli were more pink or blue-stimuli nearest the pink-blue midpoint were the most uncertain and the most difficult to classify. Children also had an option to acknowledge difficulty and gain the necessary information for correct classification. As predicted, children most often asked for help on the most difficult stimuli. This result confirms that some metacognitive abilities appear early in cognitive development. The tasks of animal metacognition research clearly have substantial utility for exploring the early developmental roots of human metacognition.

The highs and lows of theoretical interpretation in animal-metacognition research

Humans feel uncertain. They know when they do not know. These feelings and the responses to them ground the research literature on metacognition. It is a natural question whether animals share this cognitive capacity, and thus animal metacognition has become an influential research area within comparative psychology. Researchers have explored this question by testing many species using perception and memory paradigms. There is an emerging consensus that animals share functional parallels with humans' conscious metacognition. Of course, this research area poses difficult issues of scientific inference. How firmly should we hold the line in insisting that animals' performances are low-level and associative? How high should we set the bar for concluding that animals share metacognitive capacities with humans? This area offers a constructive case study for considering theoretical problems that often confront comparative psychologists. The authors present this case study and address diverse issues of scientific judgement and interpretation within comparative psychology.

Do actions speak louder than words? A comparative perspective on implicit versus explicit meta-cognition and theory of mind

Research in non-human animal (hereafter, animal) cognition has found strong evidence that some animal species are capable of meta-cognitively monitoring their mental states. They know when they know and when they do not know. In contrast, animals have generally not shown robust theory of mind (ToM) capabilities. Comparative research uses methods that are non-verbal, and thus might easily be labelled 'implicit' using the terminology of traditional human cognition. However, comparative psychology has developed several non-verbal methods that are designed to test for aspects of meta-cognition that - while perhaps not fully explicit - go beyond the merely implicit or associative. We believe similar methods might be useful to developmental researchers who work with young children, and may provide a sound empirical alternative to verbal reports. Comparative psychology has moved away from all-or-none categorical labels (e.g., 'implicit' vs. 'explicit') towards a theoretical framework that contains a spectrum of mental abilities ranging from implicit to explicit, and from associative to cognitive to fully conscious. We discuss how this same framework might be applied to developmental psychology when it comes to implicit versus explicit processing and ToM.

Rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) show robust evidence for memory awareness across multiple generalization tests

The possibility that memory awareness occurs in nonhuman animals has been evaluated by providing opportunity to decline memory tests. Current evidence suggests that rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) selectively decline tests when memory is weak (Hampton in Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 98:5359-5362, 2001; Smith et al. in Behav Brain Sci 26:317-374, 2003). However, much of the existing research in nonhuman metacognition is subject to the criticism that, after considerable training on one test type, subjects learn to decline difficult trials based on associative learning of external test-specific contingencies rather than by evaluating the private status of memory or other cognitive states. We evaluated whether such test-specific associations could account for performance by presenting monkeys with a series of generalization tests across which no single association with external stimuli was likely to adaptively control use of the decline response. Six monkeys performed a four alternative delayed matching to location task and were significantly more accurate on trials with a decline option available than on trials without it, indicating that subjects selectively declined tests when memory was weak. Monkeys transferred appropriate use of the decline response under three conditions that assessed generalization: two tests that weakened memory and one test that enhanced memory in a novel way. Bidirectional generalization indicates that use of the decline response by monkeys is not controlled by specific external stimuli but is rather a flexible behavior based on a private assessment of memory.

"Play it Again": a new method for testing metacognition in animals

Putative metacognition data in animals may be explained by non-metacognition models (e.g., stimulus generalization). The primary objective of the present study was to develop a new method for testing metacognition in animals that may yield data that can be explained by metacognition but not by non-metacognition models. Next, we used the new method with rats. Rats were first presented with a brief noise duration which they would subsequently classify as short or long. Rats were sometimes forced to take an immediate duration test, forced to repeat the same duration, or had the choice to take the test or repeat the duration. Metacognition, but not an alternative non-metacognition model, predicts that accuracy on difficult durations is higher when subjects are forced to repeat the stimulus compared to trials in which the subject chose to repeat the stimulus, a pattern observed in our data. Simulation of a non-metacognition model suggests that this part of the data from rats is consistent with metacognition, but other aspects of the data are not consistent with metacognition. The current results call into question previous findings suggesting that rats have metacognitive abilities. Although a mixed pattern of data does not support metacognition in rats, we believe the introduction of the method may be valuable for testing with other species to help evaluate the comparative case for metacognition.

Evaluating information-seeking approaches to metacognition

Metacognition has been divided into information monitoring and control processes. Monitoring involves knowing that you know or do not know some information without taking corrective action. Control involves taking corrective action based on the knowledge that you know or do not know some information. In comparative metacognition, considerable attention has been paid toward critically assessing putative evidence for information monitoring in non-human animals. However, less attention has been paid toward critically evaluating evidence for control processes in animals. We briefly review a critique of information-monitoring in animals. Next, we apply these concepts to a number of studies that focus on information seeking in animals. The main type of evidence for control processes in animals come from tube tipping experiments. Before having the opportunity to search for the bait in these experiments, the subject sometimes observes opaque tubes being baited but is sometimes prevented from seeing the baiting. The observations that the subjects look more if baiting was not seen and are more accurate if baiting was seen have been taken as evidence for metacognition in information-seeking experiments. We propose simple alternative hypotheses that are sufficient to explain putative evidence for information seeking in animals without positing metacognition. The alternative explanation focuses on two relatively simple principles: First, an animal has a default "look before you go" response which supersedes random searches in space. Second, spatially guided behavior follows a default rule of "go where something good is." These principles can explain the results of tube tipping experiments without proposing metacognition.

Pigeons exhibit higher accuracy for chosen memory tests than for forced memory tests in duration matching-to-sample

Following training to match 2- and 8-sec durations of feederlight to red and green comparisons with a 0-sec baseline delay, pigeons were allowed to choose to take a memory test or to escape the memory test. The effects of sample omission, increases in retention interval, and variation in trial spacing on selection of the escape option and accuracy were studied. During initial testing, escaping the test did not increase as the task became more difficult, and there was no difference in accuracy between chosen and forced memory tests. However, with extended training, accuracy for chosen tests was significantly greater than for forced tests. In addition, two pigeons exhibited higher accuracy on chosen tests than on forced tests at the short retention interval and greater escape rates at the long retention interval. These results have not been obtained in previous studies with pigeons when the choice to take the test or to escape the test is given before test stimuli are presented. It appears that task-specific methodological factors may determine whether a particular species will exhibit the two behavioral effects that were initially proposed as potentially indicative of metacognition.

Navigating the interface between learning and cognition

The interface of learning and cognition applied to the study of animal behavior represents a target for significant progress if conceptual barriers can be reduced. Is animal behavior exclusively a product of learning or cognition, or are both implicated? Are special (i.e., new) methods required to study cognition or will the enterprise be accomplished by using well-established methods from learning? What types of hypotheses need to be tested to dissociate cognition from learning, and may these hypotheses be profitably tested? This article addresses the above questions by focusing on conceptual, methodological, and hypothesis-testing perspectives for navigating the interface between learning and cognition. Examples from contemporary research are used to develop some suggestions for best practices. The development of a rodent model of episodic memory is used as a case study to feature the validation of an animal model of cognition.

Beyond stimulus cues and reinforcement signals: a new approach to animal metacognition

Some metacognition paradigms for nonhuman animals encourage the alternative explanation that animals avoid difficult trials based only on reinforcement history and stimulus aversion. To explore this possibility, we placed humans and monkeys in successive uncertainty-monitoring tasks that were qualitatively different, eliminating many associative cues that might support transfer across tasks. In addition, task transfer occurred under conditions of deferred and rearranged feedback-both species completed blocks of trials followed by summary feedback. This ensured that animals received no trial-by-trial reinforcement. Despite distancing performance from associative cues, humans and monkeys still made adaptive uncertainty responses by declining the most difficult trials. These findings suggest that monkeys' uncertainty responses could represent a higher-level, decisional process of cognitive monitoring, though that process need not involve full self-awareness or consciousness. The dissociation of performance from reinforcement has theoretical implications concerning the status of reinforcement as the critical binding force in animal learning.

Metacognition in animals: Trends and challenges

There is widespread agreement that metacognition is not demonstrated if alternative explanations account for putative meta-cognition data. However, there is less agreement on which studies are protected from alternative explanations. We have argued that existing experiments on uncertainty monitoring can be explained by low-level explanations without assuming metacognition (Crystal & Foote, 2009). The field would benefit from the development of accepted standards for what is required to produce a convincing example of metacognition in animals.