Transfer of Metacognitive Skills and Hint Seeking in Monkeys

Nate Kornell (), Lisa K Son () and Herbert S Terrace ()
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Nate Kornell: University of California, Los Angeles
Lisa K Son: Barnard College
Herbert S Terrace: Columbia University

No 64, Economics Working Papers from Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science

Abstract: Metacognition is knowledge that can be expressed as confidence judgments about what we know (monitoring) and by strategies for learning what we don’t know (control). Although a substantial literature exists on cognitive processes in animals, little is known about their metacognitive abilities. Here we show that rhesus macaques, trained previously to make retrospective confidence judgments about their performance on perceptual tasks, transferred that ability immediately to a new perceptual task and to a working memory task. In a second experiment we show that monkeys can also learn to request “hints” when they are given problems that they would otherwise have to solve by trial and error. This shows, for the first time, that non-human primates share with humans the ability to monitor and transfer their metacognitive ability both within and between different cognitive tasks, and to seek new knowledge on a need to know basis.

Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2006-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe and nep-knm
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