{"id":266392,"date":"2017-09-06T08:23:24","date_gmt":"2017-09-06T12:23:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=266392"},"modified":"2017-09-11T08:34:03","modified_gmt":"2017-09-11T12:34:03","slug":"monkey-sees-monkey-knows-metacognition-266392","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/monkey-sees-monkey-knows-metacognition-266392\/","title":{"rendered":"Monkey sees. . . monkey knows?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Socrates is often quoted as having said, \u201cI know that I know nothing.\u201d This ability to know what you know or don\u2019t know\u2014and how confident you are in what you think you know\u2014is called metacognition.<\/p>\n

When asked a question, a human being can decline to answer if he knows that he does not know the answer. Although non-human animals cannot verbally declare any sort of metacognitive judgments, Jessica Cantlon, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences<\/a><\/strong> at Rochester, and PhD candidate Stephen Ferrigno, have found that non-human primates exhibit a metacognitive process similar to humans. Their research on metacognition is part of a larger enterprise of figuring out whether non-human animals are \u201cconscious\u201d in the human sense.<\/p>\n

In a paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B<\/em><\/a><\/strong>, they report that monkeys, like humans, base their metacognitive confidence level on fluency\u2014how easy something is to see, hear, or perceive. For example, humans are more confident that something is correct, trustworthy, or memorable\u2014even if this may not be the case\u2014if it is written in a larger font.<\/p>\n

\u201cHumans have a variety of these metacognitive illusions\u2014false beliefs about how they learn or remember best,\u201d Cantlon says.<\/p>\n

Because other primate species exhibit metacognitive illusions like humans do, the researchers believe this cognitive ability could have an evolutionary basis. Cognitive abilities that have an evolutionary basis are likely to emerge early in development.<\/p>\n

\u201cStudying metacognition in non-human primates could give us a foothold for how to study metacognition in young children,\u201d Cantlon says. \u201cUnderstanding the most basic and primitive forms of metacognition is important for predicting the circumstances that lead to good versus poor learning in human children.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cantlon and Ferrigno determined that non-human primates exhibited metacognitive illusions after they observed primates completing a series of steps on a computer:<\/p>\n

\"four<\/p>\n