Consciousness; metacognition (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, July 08, 2016, 19:29 (2849 days ago) @ dhw

Do animals recognize, as we do that we don't know what we would like to know. The answer is yes:-http://phys.org/news/2016-07-monkeys-google.html-"But that is different from what we see in humans," said Alexandra Rosati, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard and lead author of the study. "We wanted to know if monkeys could engage in metacognition on the spot when confronted with a brand-new problem."-"Rosati and Santos came up with an ingenious way to test whether free-ranging rhesus monkeys spontaneously know when they need more information. They gave monkeys a chance to search for food placed into one of two cylinders, arranged in a V-shape. When monkeys saw which cylinder the food went into, they quickly ran to that spot to retrieve the food. But when monkeys weren't sure which container had the food, they instead ran to the junction of the two cylinders where they could check the contents of both before they committed to searching one container. They rarely approached the center if it was not possible to check the other locations in this way.-"These results show that monkeys spontaneously used information about their own knowledge states when figuring out how to search for the food.-"'Our human understanding of when we need more information is such a ubiquitous behavior that we never give it a thought," Santos said. "When navigating a new city, we know the difference between knowing where we're going and realizing we need a map. When considering grabbing an umbrella, we already know it's raining or that we need to look outside. Our results hint that monkeys have that same feeling of certainty and uncertainty themselves, and it guides their behavior."-"But that is different from what we see in humans," said Alexandra Rosati, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard and lead author of the study. "We wanted to know if monkeys could engage in metacognition on the spot when confronted with a brand-new problem."-"Rosati and Santos came up with an ingenious way to test whether free-ranging rhesus monkeys spontaneously know when they need more information. They gave monkeys a chance to search for food placed into one of two cylinders, arranged in a V-shape. When monkeys saw which cylinder the food went into, they quickly ran to that spot to retrieve the food. But when monkeys weren't sure which container had the food, they instead ran to the junction of the two cylinders where they could check the contents of both before they committed to searching one container. They rarely approached the center if it was not possible to check the other locations in this way.-These results show that monkeys spontaneously used information about their own knowledge states when figuring out how to search for the food.-"'Our human understanding of when we need more information is such a ubiquitous behavior that we never give it a thought," Santos said. "When navigating a new city, we know the difference between knowing where we're going and realizing we need a map. When considering grabbing an umbrella, we already know it's raining or that we need to look outside. Our results hint that monkeys have that same feeling of certainty and uncertainty themselves, and it guides their behavior.'"-Comment: Not at all surprising. My dog when puzzled, will check all doors to ferret out a sound we make to play with him. This is part of straight forward consciousness recognizing a problem.