Rhesus Monkeys Show Cognitive Self Awareness

 http://www.buffalo.edu/news/fast-execute.cgi/article-page.html?article=64980009

 BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Humans are able to feel uncertainty. They know when
 they know something and when they don't. This capacity for
 "metacognition" (thinking about thinking), or cognitive self-awareness,
 is thought to be one of humans' most sophisticated cognitive capacities
 and to be linked to our reflective consciousness.

 One of the important questions in the field of animal and human psychology
 is whether this metacognitive capacity is uniquely human, or whether
 nonverbal, nonhuman animal species have a level of metacognition that
 approaches that of humans. Animals could demonstrate a capacity for
 metacognition if they could report their uncertainty or doubt when
 confronted with a difficult trial or situation. However, research in this
 area has been slow to emerge because it is inherently difficult to ask
 nonverbal animals whether they know, or feel uncertain, or have doubts.

 Steps toward solving this problem now have been made by a research team led
 by John David Smith, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of
 Psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Buffalo
 and UB's Center for Cognitive Science. The research team includes Wendy E.
 Shields, Ph.D., of the Department of Psychology, University of Montana, and
 David A. Washburn, Ph.D., of the Language Research Center at Georgia State
 University.

 Their research, "The Comparative Psychology of Uncertainty Monitoring and
 Metacognition," will be presented in the fall issue of The Behavioral and
 Brain Sciences, one of the premier journals in the field of cognitive
 science.

 The article describes three studies by the authors with humans, a group of
 Rhesus monkeys and one bottlenose dolphin that used behavioral, nonverbal
 measures of metacognition. In these tasks, animals experienced a mix of
 "hard" and "easy" perceptual or memory trials. If they completed the trial,
 the subjects earned a reward when correct or a timeout period when wrong.

 "The key innovation in this research also was to grant animals an 'uncertain'
 response so that they could decline to complete any trials of their choosing,"
 Smith says. "Given this option, animals might choose to complete trials when 
 they are confident they know, but decline them when they feel something like
 uncertainty. To show this behavioral pattern, though, animals would have to
 monitor some psychological signal of confidence or uncertainty and respond
 adaptively to it."

 The researchers have shown that the monkeys and the dolphin used the
 "uncertain" response in a pattern that is essentially identical to the
 pattern with which uncertain humans use it. 
 ...
 Moreover, it is clear that a higher-level cognitive interpretation of the
 results is warranted -- low-level behavioral explanations cannot explain the
 phenomena. In short, Smith says, "the results suggest that some animals have
 functional features of, or parallels to, human conscious metacognition."

 They apparently know when they know and when they don't know, he adds.

 Another intriguing finding emerging from this area of research is that species
 that are less cognitively sophisticated (e.g., rats and pigeons) have not thus
 far expressed the same capacity for cognitive monitoring or cognitive
 self-awareness as that expressed by the monkeys and dolphin in the studies.
 Smith and his co-researchers point out that by using the same metacognitive
 paradigms broadly across species, scientists may be able to draw the map showing
 which species have evolved cognitive self-awareness. This could reveal when in
 evolution reflective cognition emerged and how widespread this capacity is among
 animals. 
 ...

Now that's darn interesting. If cognitive self awareness can be shown in
monkeys, then this could be said to go waaaaaayyy back.