Rosati Alexandra G, Felsche Elisa, Cole Megan F, Atencia Rebeca, Rukundo Joshua
Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA; Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA; Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
Cognition. 2024 Oct;251:105898. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105898. Epub 2024 Jul 25.
Humans can flexibly use metacognition to monitor their own knowledge and strategically acquire new information when needed. While humans can deploy these skills across a variety of contexts, most evidence for metacognition in animals has focused on simple situations, such as seeking out information about the location of food. Here, we examine the flexibility, breadth, and limits of this skill in chimpanzees. We tested semi-free-ranging chimpanzees on a novel task where they could seek information by standing up to peer into different containers. In Study 1, we tested n = 47 chimpanzees to assess if chimpanzees would spontaneously engage in information-seeking without prior experience, as well as to characterize individual variation in this propensity. We found that many chimpanzees engaged in information-seeking with minimal experience, and that younger chimpanzees and females were more likely to do so. In two subsequent studies, we then further tested chimpanzees who initially showed robust information-seeking on new variations of this task, to disentangle the cognitive processing shaping their behaviors. In Study 2, we examined how a subset of n = 12 chimpanzees applied these skills to seek information about the location versus the identity of rewards, and found that chimpanzees were equally adept at seeking out location and identity information. In Study 3, we examined whether a subset of n = 6 chimpanzees could apply these skills to make more efficacious decisions when faced with uncertainty about reward payoffs. Chimpanzees were able to use information-seeking to resolve risk and choose more optimally when faced with uncertain payoffs, although they often also engaged in information-seeking when it was not strictly necessary. These results identify core features of flexible metacognition that chimpanzees share with humans, as well as constraints that may represent key evolutionary shifts in human cognition.
人类能够灵活运用元认知来监控自身知识，并在需要时策略性地获取新信息。虽然人类可以在各种情境中运用这些技能，但动物元认知的大多数证据都集中在简单的情境中，比如寻找食物位置的信息。在此，我们研究了黑猩猩这项技能的灵活性、广度和局限性。我们在一项新任务中测试了半放养的黑猩猩，在该任务中它们可以通过站起来窥视不同容器来获取信息。在研究1中，我们测试了n = 47只黑猩猩，以评估黑猩猩是否会在没有先前经验的情况下自发地进行信息搜索，以及描述这种倾向的个体差异。我们发现，许多黑猩猩在经验极少的情况下就会进行信息搜索，而且年轻的黑猩猩和雌性更有可能这样做。在随后的两项研究中，我们进一步测试了最初在这项任务的新变体上表现出强烈信息搜索行为的黑猩猩，以厘清塑造它们行为的认知过程。在研究2中，我们研究了n = 12只黑猩猩中的一部分是如何运用这些技能来获取关于奖励位置与奖励身份的信息的，结果发现黑猩猩在寻找位置信息和身份信息方面同样熟练。在研究3中，我们研究了n = 6只黑猩猩中的一部分在面对奖励回报不确定时是否能够运用这些技能做出更有效的决策。黑猩猩能够利用信息搜索来化解风险，并在面对不确定的回报时做出更优选择，尽管它们在并非严格必要时也常常进行信息搜索。这些结果确定了黑猩猩与人类共有的灵活元认知的核心特征，以及可能代表人类认知关键进化转变的限制因素。
