1911/01/01 by Justin J. Couchman, Mariana V. C. Coutinho, Michael J. Beran +2 · 2 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Mathematics · Neuroscience · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Animal cognition #Artificial intelligence #Associative learning #Associative property #Child and Animal Learning Development #Cognition #Cognitive psychology #Comparative and International Law Studies #Computer science #Developmental psychology #Dissociation (chemistry) #Mathematics #Memory and Neural Mechanisms #Metacognition #Neuroscience #Psychology #Reinforcement #Reinforcement learning #Social psychology #Stimulus (psychology) #Zebrafish Biomedical Research Applications
paper · doi:10.1037/a0020129
openalex publication_date 1911/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
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.