Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Science, The University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY 14260-4110, USA.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2012 May 19;367(1594):1297-309. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2011.0366.
Humans feel uncertain. They know when they do not know. These feelings and the responses to them ground the research literature on metacognition. It is a natural question whether animals share this cognitive capacity, and thus animal metacognition has become an influential research area within comparative psychology. Researchers have explored this question by testing many species using perception and memory paradigms. There is an emerging consensus that animals share functional parallels with humans' conscious metacognition. Of course, this research area poses difficult issues of scientific inference. How firmly should we hold the line in insisting that animals' performances are low-level and associative? How high should we set the bar for concluding that animals share metacognitive capacities with humans? This area offers a constructive case study for considering theoretical problems that often confront comparative psychologists. The authors present this case study and address diverse issues of scientific judgement and interpretation within comparative psychology.
人类感到不确定。他们知道自己不知道什么。这些感觉和对这些感觉的反应是元认知研究文献的基础。动物是否具有这种认知能力是一个自然的问题，因此动物元认知已成为比较心理学内一个有影响力的研究领域。研究人员通过使用感知和记忆范式测试许多物种来探索这个问题。人们越来越一致地认为，动物与人类有意识的元认知具有功能上的相似性。当然，这个研究领域提出了科学推断的难题。我们应该坚持认为动物的表现是低级的和联想的，应该坚持到什么程度？我们应该设定多高的标准来得出动物与人类具有元认知能力的结论？这个领域为考虑比较心理学家经常面临的理论问题提供了一个建设性的案例研究。作者提出了这个案例研究，并讨论了比较心理学中不同的科学判断和解释问题。
