Researchers have begun to explore animals' capacities for uncertainty monitoring and metacognition. This exploration could extend the study of animal self-awareness and establish the relationship of self-awareness to other-awareness. It could sharpen descrip- tions of metacognition in the human literature and suggest the earliest roots of metacognition in human development. We summarize research on uncertainty monitoring by humans, monkeys, and a dolphin within perceptual and metamemory tasks. We extend phyloge- netically the search for metacognitive capacities by considering studies that have tested less cognitively sophisticated species. By using the same uncertainty-monitoring paradigms across species, it should be possible to map the phylogenetic distribution of metacognition and illuminate the emergence of mind. We provide a unifying formal description of animals' performances and examine the optimality of their decisional strategies. Finally, we interpret animals' and humans' nearly identical performances psychologically. Low-level, stim- ulus-based accounts cannot explain the phenomena. The results suggest granting animals a higher-level decision-making process that in- volves criterion setting using controlled cognitive processes. This conclusion raises the difficult question of animal consciousness. The results show that animals have functional features of or parallels to human conscious cognition. Remaining questions are whether ani- mals also have the phenomenal features that are the feeling/knowing states of human conscious cognition, and whether the present par- adigms can be extended to demonstrate that they do. Thus, the comparative study of metacognition potentially grounds the systematic study of animal consciousness.

/pdf/the-comparative-psychology-of-uncertainty-monitoring-and-3evbg1ucgb.pdf

The comparative psychology of uncertainty monitoring and metacognition.

This paper is a selective review of the methods, problems, and findings in the area of operant stimulus generalization over the 25 years since the publication of the original paper by Guttman and Kalish (1956) on discriminability and spectral generalization in the pigeon. The paper falls into five main sections, which encompass the main themes and problems stemming from the Guttman and Kalish work and its immediate successors. The first section addresses the relationship between stimulus generalization and stimulus control, as well as the variety of testing procedures and dependent variables used to measure generalization. The next section reviews the limited literature on the effects of early rearing on the generalization gradient. The relationship between discriminability among test stimuli and the slope of the spectral gradient is discussed in the third section, with emphasis upon recent reassessments of the pigeon's hue discriminability function. The fourth section reviews the topic of inhibitory stimulus control, one which developed with the discovery of the peak shift following intradimensional discrimination training. Problems of definition and measurement are discussed in conjunction with the gradient forms used to index inhibitory control. The last section is devoted to attentional effects and the two principal theories postulated to account for them. A survey of different attentional paradigms is provided and the possible role of constant irrelevant stimuli as a source of control is examined. A brief conclusion summarizes the contribution of the generalization technique toward an understanding of the nature and acquisition of stimulus control.

/pdf/the-legacy-of-guttman-and-kalish-1956-twenty-five-years-of-1ef5c6pg8p.pdf

The legacy of Guttman and Kalish (1956): Twenty-five years of research on stimulus generalization.

https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/pdf/S1364-6613(09)00148-X.pdf

The study of animal metacognition

/pdf/signal-detection-theory-and-operant-behavior-a-review-of-kvql1cpv50.pdf

SIGNAL DETECTION THEORY AND OPERANT BEHAVIOR: A Review of David M. Green and John A. Swets' Signal Detection Theory and Psychophysics.1

Peak shift'' is a behavioral response bias arising from discrimination learning in which animals display a directional, but limited, preference for or avoidance of unusual stimuli. Its hypothesized evolutionary relevance has been primarily in the realm of aposematic coloration and limited sexual dimorphism. Here, we develop a novel functional approach to peak shift, based on signal detection theory, which characterizes the response bias as arising from uncertainty about stimulus appearance, frequency, and quality. This approach allows the influence of peak shift to be generalized to the evolution of signals in a variety of domains and sensory modalities. The approach is illustrated with a bumblebee (Bombus impatiens) discrimination learning experiment. Bees exhibited peak shift while foraging in an artificial Batesian mimicry system. Changes in flower abundance, color distribution, and visitation reward induced bees to preferentially visit novel flower colors that reduced the risk of flower-type misidentification. Under conditions of signal uncertainty, peak shift results in visitation to rarer, but more easily distinguished, morphological variants of rewarding species in preference to their average morphology. Peak shift is a common and taxonomically wide- spread phenomenon. This example of the possible role of peak shift in signal evolution can be generalized to other systems in which a signal receiver learns to make choices in situations in which signal variation is linked to the sender's reproductive success.

/pdf/peak-shift-discrimination-learning-as-a-mechanism-of-signal-nvln672l2o.pdf

Peak shift discrimination learning as a mechanism of signal evolution

Decision theory, the pigeon, and the psychophysical function.

Discrimination performance in the pigeon.

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Decision theory, the pigeon, and the psychophysical function.

Discrimination performance in the pigeon.