14 DAY TRIAL // German investigators from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, argue that metacognition should no longer be regarded as a uniquely-human trait. They say that the ability may actually exist in other animals as well, and reveal that new experiments confirmed its existence in great apes, including bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. Metacognition is a philosophical concept that refers to awareness, and to knowledge about knowledge. Humans exhibit the trait when they surprise themselves thinking on something. They can therefore analyze their own thoughts.
Great apes stand out from the crowd, because it's simpler to analyze them thanks to their similarities to humans. According to the Max Planck team, these animals are perfectly capable of understanding that some of the choices they make may be wrong. This is a great leap forward from simply doing whatever springs to mind, or what instincts say. Details of the new investigation appear in the latest issue of Springer's respected scientific journal, Animal Cognition.
In the experiments the team conducted, seven gorillas, eight chimpanzees, four bonobos and seven orangutans, were subjected to batteries of tests, each of them aimed at gaging specific abilities that the animals may or may have not had. In one of the setups, baits were placed inside two tubes, and the great apes had to retrieve it. But in some cases, they were shown where the food was at, and in other cases, they were left to look for themselves. They had to select the food that brought them the highest amount of pleasure, and the researchers noticed that, whenever the animals had to find these foods, they tended to be more careful in their quest, indicating they knew a mistake could cost them.
“The current results indicate that the looking response appears to be a function of at least three factors: the cost of looking inside the tube, the value of the reward and the state of the information. The combination of these three factors creates an information processing system that possesses complexity, flexibility and control, three of the features of metacognition. These findings suggest that nonhuman animals may possess some metacognitive abilities, too,” says Dr Call, quoted by AlphaGalileo.