Ratties demonstrate metacognition

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Excerpt:

Researchers have believed for some time that people and non-human primates are capable of “metacognition”—reasoning or thinking about one’s own thinking. There have been studies on birds about this kind of thinking process, but results thus far have been inconclusive. The new study is the first that shows a non-primate species has metacognition—a proposal that may well be controversial.

The study involved what is called a “duration-discrimination” test—offering rats rewards for classifying a signal as either short or long. As in most such tests, the “right” answer led to a large food reward, while a “wrong” answer led to no reward at all. The twist, however, is that before taking the duration test, the rats were given the chance to decline the test completely. If they made that choice, they got a small reward anyway.

“If rats have knowledge about whether they know or don’t know the answer to the test, we would expect them to decline most frequently on difficult tests,” said Crystal. “They would also show the lowest accuracy on difficult tests that they can’t decline. Our data showed both to be true, suggesting the rats have knowledge of their own cognitive states.”