The comparative psychology of uncertainty monitoring and metacognition.
The comparative psychology of uncertainty monitoring and metacognition.
复制标题
DOI：
10.1017/s0140525x03000086
复制
发表时间：
2003-06
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Lisa K. Sona;Bennett L. Schwartzb;Nate Kornellc
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Lisa K. Sona;Bennett L. Schwartzb;Nate Kornellc
研究人员已经开始探索动物的不确定性监测和元认知能力。这一探索可以拓展动物自我意识的研究，建立动物自我意识与他者意识的关系。它可以使人类文献中对元认知的描述更加清晰，并提示元认知在人类发展中的最早根源。我们总结了人类、猴子和海豚在感知和元记忆任务中的不确定性监测研究。我们通过考虑已经测试了认知不太复杂的物种的研究，扩展了对元认知能力的系统发育研究。通过跨物种使用相同的不确定性监测范式，应该有可能绘制元认知的系统发育分布图并阐明心智的出现。我们提供了一个统一的形式描述动物的表现和检查他们的决策策略的最优性。最后，我们从心理上解释动物和人类几乎相同的行为。低级的、基于刺激的解释无法解释这种现象。结果表明，赋予动物更高层次的决策过程，包括使用受控认知过程设定标准。这个结论提出了关于动物意识的难题。结果表明，动物具有与人类有意识认知相似或相似的功能特征。剩下的问题是，动物是否也具有人类有意识认知的感觉/认知状态的现象特征，以及目前的范式是否可以扩展到证明它们确实存在。因此，元认知的比较研究可能为动物意识的系统研究奠定基础。
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 descriptions 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 phylogenetically 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, stimulus-based accounts cannot explain the phenomena. The results suggest granting animals a higher-level decision-making process that involves 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 animals also have the phenomenal features that are the feeling/knowing states of human conscious cognition, and whether the present paradigms can be extended to demonstrate that they do. Thus, the comparative study of metacognition potentially grounds the systematic study of animal consciousness.