Official 30 - lecture 1
psychology class.
we have been talking about animal cognition, the study of animal intelligence.
much of the research in this area is motivated by the search of animal analogs, or parallels to human cognitive processes.
one of the processes we've been investigating is meta-cognition.
what is meta cognition? it is being aware of what one knows or feels, having the awareness of one's state of mind and making decision about behavior based what one knows.
Research have been long been interested in whether animal process this capability, but couldn't test it, because animals aren't able to report their feelings.
but recently, one group of research find a way to solve this problem.
they did studies on monkey and dolphins that proves evidence that these animals have the ability to feel uncertainty.
to feel unsure about something, to know that they are uncertain.
so, how could this research figure out if animals feel uncertainty?
it began with a study one of them did on a dolphin, who'd been trained to recognized a particular high-pitch tone.
the dolphin was taught to press the one of the two paddles depending on whether it heard the high tune or the one that was lower.
food was reward to a correct response, but if the wrong paddle was pressed, the dolphin had to wait several seconds before it could try again.
the task varied in difficulty according to the pith of the second tune. the closer it came in pith to the first one, the harder it became for the dolphin to correctly identify it as low.
and research noted that dolphin was quite eager to press the paddle when it was sure of answer. But exhibited hesitation during difficult tries.
next, the researcher introduce a third option, a third paddle that would initiate a new trial, giving the dolphin the choice of passing on difficult trails.
once the dolphin figured out the result of pressing this new paddle , it did choose frequently when the trail was difficult.
the research took that as indication that animal wanted to pass because it didn't know the answer, they knew they didn't know.
but there was a problem, other research protested that the up-out response was simply learned or conditioned response, you remember that on psychology, right.
In other words, by pressing the pass paddle, the dolphin avoided having to wait, and hastened the possibility of a food reward by moving directly to the next trial.
so the experiment didn't necessarily indicate dolphin had the knowledge of its own uncertainty, just it wanted to avoid negative consequences.
so more recently, our research and his colleague devised a new study, this time using monkeys.
in this experiment, the monkeys had to identify certain patterns displayed on a computer screen.
these patterns are analogous to the tunes used in dolphin experiment, one type of pattern was of a specific density and was to be classified as dense.
while the second type of pattern could vary in density, but was always less than the first one. and the monkey task is to identify the second type as sparse.
so the denser the second type pattern was, the more difficult the task became. And as in the previous study, the monkey was given a third choice that allow them to pass on a new trial.
but unlike the dolphin experiment, the monkey had to complete full trials before they got any feedback.
they didn't know if they had responded correctly or incorrectly after each trial, because they was no reward or punishment.
after the end of four trials, feedback was given, monkey received food reward for each correct response and a time out during with a buzzer was sounded, for each incorrect response.
but monkey had no way to tell which reward or punishment was associated with which response.
and they didn't get either reward or punishment for choosing pass option, the uncertainty response.
but never the less, they still choose this option in the appropriate circumstances, when the trial was particular difficult.
and this is evidence that wasn't simply a conditioned response, because the response didn't guarantee the faster reward.
so what does they all tell us about animal consciousness or animals' awareness of themselves and their state of mind.
can we really know what's going on in the mind of animals?
no, of course not.
but exploring the meta-cognitive capacity of animals could become an important criterion in highlighting the similarities and differences between human and animal minds.