Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2013 Nov 19;110(47):19155-9. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1314571110. Epub 2013 Nov 4.
Human decision-making strategies are strongly influenced by an awareness of certainty or uncertainty (a form of metacognition) to increase the chances of making a right choice. Humans seek more information and defer choosing when they realize they have insufficient information to make an accurate decision, but whether animals are aware of uncertainty is currently highly contentious. To explore this issue, we examined how honey bees (Apis mellifera) responded to a visual discrimination task that varied in difficulty between trials. Free-flying bees were rewarded for a correct choice, punished for an incorrect choice, or could avoid choosing by exiting the trial (opting out). Bees opted out more often on difficult trials, and opting out improved their proportion of successful trials. Bees could also transfer the concept of opting out to a novel task. Our data show that bees selectively avoid difficult tasks they lack the information to solve. This finding has been considered as evidence that nonhuman animals can assess the certainty of a predicted outcome, and bees' performance was comparable to that of primates in a similar paradigm. We discuss whether these behavioral results prove bees react to uncertainty or whether associative mechanisms can explain such findings. To better frame metacognition as an issue for neurobiological investigation, we propose a neurobiological hypothesis of uncertainty monitoring based on the known circuitry of the honey bee brain.
人类的决策策略受到对确定性或不确定性的认知（一种元认知形式）的强烈影响，以增加做出正确选择的机会。当人类意识到自己没有足够的信息来做出准确的决策时，他们会寻求更多的信息并推迟选择，但动物是否意识到不确定性目前仍存在很大争议。为了探讨这个问题，我们研究了蜜蜂（Apis mellifera）如何对视觉辨别任务做出反应，该任务在试验之间存在难度变化。自由飞行的蜜蜂因正确选择而获得奖励，因错误选择而受到惩罚，或者可以通过退出试验（选择退出）来避免选择。蜜蜂在困难的试验中选择退出的次数更多，选择退出可以提高它们成功试验的比例。蜜蜂还可以将选择退出的概念转移到新任务上。我们的数据表明，蜜蜂会选择性地避免他们缺乏信息来解决的困难任务。这一发现被认为是动物可以评估预测结果的确定性的证据，而且蜜蜂在类似的范式中的表现与灵长类动物相当。我们讨论了这些行为结果是否证明蜜蜂对不确定性做出反应，或者联想机制是否可以解释这些发现。为了更好地将元认知作为神经生物学研究的一个问题来阐述，我们提出了一个基于蜜蜂大脑已知回路的不确定性监测的神经生物学假设。
