RESUMEN

Overestimation and miscalibration increase with a decrease in performance. This finding has been attributed to a common factor: participants' knowledge and skills about the task performed. Researchers proposed that the same knowledge and skills needed for performing well in a test are also required for accurately evaluating one's performance. Thus, when people lack knowledge about a topic they are tested on, they perform poorly and do not know they did so. This is a compelling explanation for why low performers overestimate themselves, but such increases in overconfidence can also be due to statistical artifacts. Therefore, whether overestimation indicates lack of awareness is debatable, and additional studies are needed to clarify this issue. The present study addressed this problem by investigating the extent to which students at different levels of performance know that their self-estimates are biased. We asked 653 college students to estimate their performance in an exam and subsequently rate how confident they were that their self-estimates were accurate. The latter judgment is known as second-order judgments (SOJs) because it is a judgment of a metacognitive judgment. We then looked at whether miscalibration predicts SOJs per quartile. The findings showed that the relationship between miscalibration and SOJs was negative for high performers and positive for low performers. Specifically, for low performers, the less calibrated their self-estimates were the more confident they were in their accuracy. This finding supports the claim that awareness of what one knows and does not know depends in part on how much one knows.

RESUMEN

The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is a measure of analytical reasoning that cues an intuitive but incorrect response that must be rejected for successful performance to be attained. The CRT yields two types of errors: Intuitive errors, which are attributed to Type 1 processes; and non-intuitive errors, which result from poor numeracy skills or deficient reasoning. Past research shows that participants who commit the highest numbers of errors on the CRT overestimate their performance the most, whereas those with the lowest error-rates tend to slightly underestimate. This is an example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect (DKE). The present study examined how intuitive vs. non-intuitive errors contribute to overestimation in the CRT at different levels of performance. Female undergraduate students completed a seven-item CRT test and subsequently estimated their raw score. They also filled out the Faith in Intuition (FI) questionnaire, which is a dispositional measure of intuitive thinking. Data was separated into quartiles based on level of performance on the CRT. The results demonstrated the DKE. Additionally, intuitive and non-intuitive errors predicted miscalibration among low, but not high performers. However, intuitive errors were a stronger predictor of miscalibration. Finally, FI was positively correlated with CRT self-estimates and miscalibration, indicating that participants who perceived themselves to be more intuitive were worse at estimating their score. These results taken together suggest that participants who perform poorly in the CRT and also those who score higher in intuitive thinking disposition are more susceptible to the influences of heuristic-based cues, such as answer fluency, when judging their performance.

RESUMEN

We agree that the self is constructed through a collaborative dialog. But hostile interlocutors could use various cognitive techniques to hijack the dialog, resulting in beliefs, values, and even selves that are out of line with reality. The implications of this problem are dire, but we suggest that increased metacognitive awareness could help guide this process to a truthful conclusion.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Humans readily attribute personality and behavioral traits to dogs, and these attributions influence decisions about adoption. This study focused on how these attributions could be influenced by breed and pose by using pictures of four breeds (Doberman Pinscher, Golden Retriever, pit bull, and Rottweiler) in 4 poses (dog sitting alone, sitting with a human, standing alone, and walking on a leash with a human). Participants rated each picture on friendliness, aggressiveness, and adoptability. Eye-tracking technology identified which specific features were represented in each picture to determine whether they had any effect on the judgments. Although the Golden Retriever was seen as most adoptable, pose differences had many significant effects that could be useful for increasing the adoptability of all breeds. Data also revealed facial areas that attracted more attention (e.g., faster time to first fixation and longer fixation duration), particularly when the dog was alone. Focus on these areas could help to optimize photographs to present dogs in the friendliest, least aggressive, and most adoptable way.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

The uncertainty response has grounded the study of metacognition in nonhuman animals. Recent research has explored the processes supporting uncertainty monitoring in monkeys. It has revealed that uncertainty responding, in contrast to perceptual responding, depends on significant working memory resources. The aim of the present study was to expand this research by examining whether uncertainty monitoring is also working memory demanding in humans. To explore this issue, human participants were tested with or without a cognitive load on a psychophysical discrimination task that included either an uncertainty response (allowing the participant to decline difficult trials) or a middle-perceptual response (labeling the same intermediate trial levels). The results demonstrated that cognitive load reduced uncertainty responding, but increased middle responding. However, this dissociation between uncertainty and middle responding was only observed when participants either lacked training or had very little training with the uncertainty response. If more training was provided, the effect of load was small. These results suggest that uncertainty responding is resource demanding, but with sufficient training, human participants can respond to uncertainty either by using minimal working memory resources or by effectively sharing resources. These results are discussed in relation to the literature on animal and human metacognition.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

The sense of self-agency results from monitoring the relationship between prior thoughts and action plans, sensorimotor information, and perceived outcomes. It is thought to be an important factor underlying self-recognition and self-awareness. Three experiments investigated the sense of self-agency in humans and rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). First, humans were asked to move a cursor with a joystick while several distractor cursors also moved on-screen. They were asked to identify either the cursor they were controlling, or a distractor using visual cues alone. Six rhesus macaques were then given a similar task in which they needed to identify a self-controlled cursor that was paired with several different types of distractors. Both groups were able to identify the self-controlled cursor, and monkeys performed best when the oppositely moving cursor was the distractor. A third experiment showed that humans, like macaques, use both perceptual and self-agency information to make decisions.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

A growing literature considers whether animals have capacities that are akin to human metacognition (i.e., humans' capacity to monitor their states of uncertainty and knowing). Comparative psychologists have approached this question by testing a dolphin, pigeons, rats, monkeys, and apes using perception, memory, and food-concealment paradigms. As part of this consideration, some associative modelers have attempted to describe animals' "metacognitive" performances in low-level, associative terms-an important goal if achievable. The authors summarize the empirical and theoretical situation regarding these associative descriptions. The associative descriptions in the animal-metacognition literature fail to encompass important phenomena. The sharp focus on abstract, mathematical associative models creates serious interpretative problems. The authors compare these failed associative descriptions with an alternative theoretical approach within contemporary comparative psychology. The alternative approach has the potential to strengthen comparative psychology as an empirical science and integrate it more fully within the mainstream of experimental psychology and cognitive science.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Animal metacognition is a growing area in comparative psychology that raises questions about the evolutionary emergence of reflective mind and self-awareness. Theoretical discussions are constructive as this area develops. We thank the editor for arranging this dialogue and the commentators for contributing to it. The dialogue reveals the strong consensus that one must look beyond associationism to understand animal metacognition. The target article and the commentaries focused on cognitive process and representation, and on detailed cognitive analyses of metacognitive phenomena. Accordingly, this theoretical dialogue presents the possible outline of a new phase of animal-metacognition research.

RESUMEN

Humans feel uncertain. They know when they do not know. These feelings and the responses to them ground the research literature on metacognition. It is a natural question whether animals share this cognitive capacity, and thus animal metacognition has become an influential research area within comparative psychology. Researchers have explored this question by testing many species using perception and memory paradigms. There is an emerging consensus that animals share functional parallels with humans' conscious metacognition. Of course, this research area poses difficult issues of scientific inference. How firmly should we hold the line in insisting that animals' performances are low-level and associative? How high should we set the bar for concluding that animals share metacognitive capacities with humans? This area offers a constructive case study for considering theoretical problems that often confront comparative psychologists. The authors present this case study and address diverse issues of scientific judgement and interpretation within comparative psychology.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Research in non-human animal (hereafter, animal) cognition has found strong evidence that some animal species are capable of meta-cognitively monitoring their mental states. They know when they know and when they do not know. In contrast, animals have generally not shown robust theory of mind (ToM) capabilities. Comparative research uses methods that are non-verbal, and thus might easily be labelled 'implicit' using the terminology of traditional human cognition. However, comparative psychology has developed several non-verbal methods that are designed to test for aspects of meta-cognition that - while perhaps not fully explicit - go beyond the merely implicit or associative. We believe similar methods might be useful to developmental researchers who work with young children, and may provide a sound empirical alternative to verbal reports. Comparative psychology has moved away from all-or-none categorical labels (e.g., 'implicit' vs. 'explicit') towards a theoretical framework that contains a spectrum of mental abilities ranging from implicit to explicit, and from associative to cognitive to fully conscious. We discuss how this same framework might be applied to developmental psychology when it comes to implicit versus explicit processing and ToM.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) have shown the ability to monitor their own mental states, but fail the mirror self-recognition test. In humans, the sense of self-agency is closely related to self-awareness, and results from monitoring the relationship between intentional, sensorimotor and perceptual information. Humans and rhesus monkeys were trained to move a computer icon with a joystick while a distractor icon partially matched their movements. Both humans and monkeys were able to monitor and identify the icon they were controlling, suggesting they have some understanding of self-agency.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

When speaking or producing music, people rely in part on auditory feedback - the sounds associated with the performed action. Three experiments investigated the degree to which alterations of auditory feedback (AAF) during music performances influence the experience of agency (i.e., the sense that your actions led to auditory events) and the possible link between agency and the disruptive effect of AAF on production. Participants performed short novel melodies from memory on a keyboard. Auditory feedback during performances was manipulated with respect to its pitch contents and/or its synchrony with actions. Participants rated their experience of agency after each trial. In all experiments, AAF reduced judgments of agency across conditions. Performance was most disrupted (measured by error rates and slowing) when AAF led to an ambiguous experience of agency, suggesting that there may be some causal relationship between agency and disruption. However, analyses revealed that these two effects were probably independent. A control experiment verified that performers can make veridical judgments of agency.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

A central question in categorization research concerns the categories that animals and humans learn naturally and well. Here, the authors examined monkeys' (Macaca mulatta) and humans' (Homo sapiens) learning of the important class of exclusive-or (XOR) categories. Both species exhibited--through a sustained level of ongoing errors--substantial difficulty learning XOR category tasks at 3 stimulus dimensionalities. Clearly, both species brought a linear-separability constraint to XOR category learning. This constraint illuminates the primate category-learning system from which that of humans arose, and it has theoretical implications concerning the evolution of cognitive systems for categorization. The present data also clarify the role of exemplar-specific processes in fully explaining XOR category learning, and suggest that humans sometimes overcome their linear-separability constraint through the use of language and verbalization.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Some metacognition paradigms for nonhuman animals encourage the alternative explanation that animals avoid difficult trials based only on reinforcement history and stimulus aversion. To explore this possibility, we placed humans and monkeys in successive uncertainty-monitoring tasks that were qualitatively different, eliminating many associative cues that might support transfer across tasks. In addition, task transfer occurred under conditions of deferred and rearranged feedback-both species completed blocks of trials followed by summary feedback. This ensured that animals received no trial-by-trial reinforcement. Despite distancing performance from associative cues, humans and monkeys still made adaptive uncertainty responses by declining the most difficult trials. These findings suggest that monkeys' uncertainty responses could represent a higher-level, decisional process of cognitive monitoring, though that process need not involve full self-awareness or consciousness. The dissociation of performance from reinforcement has theoretical implications concerning the status of reinforcement as the critical binding force in animal learning.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Participants produce steep typicality gradients and large prototype-enhancement effects in dot-distortion category tasks, showing that in these tasks to-be-categorized items are compared to a prototypical representation that is the central tendency of the participant's exemplar experience. These prototype-abstraction processes have been ascribed to low-level mechanisms in primary visual cortex. Here we asked whether higher-level mechanisms in visual cortex can also sometimes support prototype abstraction. To do so, we compared dot-distortion performance when the stimuli were size constant (allowing some low-level repetition-familiarity to develop for similar shapes) or size variable (defeating repetition-familiarity effects). If prototype formation is only mediated by low-level mechanisms, stimulus-size variability should lessen prototype effects and flatten typicality gradients. Yet prototype effects and typicality gradients were the same under both conditions, whether participants learned the categories explicitly or implicitly and whether they received trial-by-trial reinforcement during transfer tests. These results broaden out the visual-cortical hypothesis because low-level visual areas, featuring retinotopic perceptual representations, would not support robust category learning or prototype-enhancement effects in an environment of pronounced variability in stimulus size. Therefore, higher-level cortical mechanisms evidently can also support prototype formation during categorization.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

That humans can categorize in different ways does not imply that there are qualitatively distinct underlying natural kinds or that the field of concepts splinters. Rather, it implies that the unitary goal of forming concepts is important enough that it receives redundant expression in cognition. Categorization science focuses on commonalities involved in concept learning. Eliminating "concept" makes this more difficult.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

In an early dissociation between intentional and incidental category learning, Kemler Nelson (1984) gave participants a categorization task that could be performed by responding either to a single-dimensional rule or to overall family resemblance. Humans learning intentionally deliberately adopted rule-based strategies; humans learning incidentally adopted family resemblance strategies. The present authors replicated Kemler Nelson's human experiment and found a similar dissociation. They also extended her paradigm so as to evaluate the balance between rules and family resemblance in determining the category decisions of rhesus monkeys. Monkeys heavily favored the family resemblance strategy. Formal models showed that even after many sessions and thousands of trials, they spread attention across all stimulus dimensions rather than focus on a single, criterial dimension that could also produce perfect categorization.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Some studies of nonhuman animals' metacognitive capacity encourage competing low-level, behavioral descriptions of trial-decline responses by animals in uncertainty-monitoring tasks. To evaluate the force of these behavioral descriptions, the authors presented 6 capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) with 2 density discrimination tasks between sparse and dense stimuli. In one task, difficult trials with stimuli near the middle of the density continuum could be declined through an "uncertainty" response. In the other task, making a "middle" response to the same stimuli was rewarded. In Experiment 1, capuchins essentially did not use the uncertainty response, but they did use the middle response. In Experiment 2, the authors replicated this result with 5 of 6 monkeys while equating the overall pace and reinforcement structure of the 2 tasks, although 1 monkey also showed appropriate use of the uncertainty response. These results challenge a purely associative interpretation of some uncertainty-monitoring performances by monkeys while sharpening the theoretical question concerning the nature of the psychological signal that occasions uncertainty responses.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

Results that point to animals' metacognitive capacity bear a heavy burden, given the potential for competing behavioral descriptions. In this article, formal models are used to evaluate the force of these descriptions. One example is that many existing studies have directly rewarded so-called uncertainty responses. Modeling confirms that this practice is an interpretative danger because it supports associative processes and encourages simpler interpretations. Another example is that existing studies raise the concern that animals avoid difficult stimuli not because of uncertainty monitored, but because of aversion given error-causing or reinforcement-lean stimuli. Modeling also justifies this concern and shows that this problem is not addressed by the common practice of comparing performance on chosen and forced trials. The models and related discussion have utility for metacognition researchers and theorists broadly, because they specify the experimental operations that will best indicate a metacognitive capacity in humans or animals by eliminating alternative behavioral accounts.

Asunto(s)

RESUMEN

The authors compared the performance of humans and monkeys in a Same-Different task. They evaluated the hypothesis that for humans the Same-Different concept is qualitative, categorical, and rule-based, so that humans distinguish 0-disparity pairs (i.e., same) from pairs with any discernible disparity (i.e., different); whereas for monkeys the Same-Different concept is quantitative, continuous, and similarity-based, so that monkeys distinguish small-disparity pairs (i.e., similar) from pairs with a large disparity (i.e., dissimilar). The results supported the hypothesis. Monkeys, more than humans, showed a gradual transition from same to different categories and an inclusive criterion for responding Same. The results have implications for comparing Same-Different performances across species--different species may not always construe or perform even identical tasks in the same way. In particular, humans may especially apply qualitative, rule-based frameworks to cognitive tasks like Same-Different.

Asunto(s)