Abstract
Rhesus monkeys are known to recognize confidence about their immediate perceptual and cognitive decisions by using a betting procedure (Son and Kornell in The missing link in cognition: origins of self-reflective consciousness. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 296–320, 2005; Kornell et al. in Psychol Sci 18:64–71, 2007). In this report, we examined whether this ability is shared in two avian species (pigeons and bantams) in order to know how widespread this metacognitive ability is among animals. We trained pigeons and bantams to search for a differently colored disk (target) among others (distracters) displayed on a touch-sensitive monitor. In test, the subjects were required to choose one of two confidence icons, “risk” and “safe”, after the visual search. A peck at the “risk” icon after a correct response in the visual search (i.e., a peck at the target) was reinforced by food and light, while that after an incorrect response (i.e., a peck at a distracter) resulted in a timeout. A peck at the “safe” icon was always reinforced by food and light, or by light only, regardless of the visual search result. The percentages of “safe” choices after incorrect responses were higher than after correct responses in all six pigeons and two of three bantams. This behavior generalized to novel stimuli in some subjects, and even to a novel line-classification task in a pigeon. These results suggest that these two distantly related avian species have in common a metacognitive ability that allows them to recognize confidence about their immediate perceptual decisions.
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Notes
In a previous study in orangutans, it took a relatively small number of trials for training (Suda-King 2008). In the present study, many hundreds of training trials were required before testing the same as previous studies in rhesus monkeys (Smith et al. 1995; Hampton 2001; Kornell et al. 2007). It may be due to task differences.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the JSPS Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (19-7134, 21-1994 to N. Nakamura; 17300085 and 20220004 to K. Fujita) and the MEXT Global COE Program “Revitalizing Education for Dynamic Hearts and Minds,” D-07 to Kyoto University, Japan. We are grateful to J. R. Anderson, University of Stirling, for careful editing of an earlier version of the manuscript. The care and use of subjects adhered to the guidelines of the Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University, and the experiment was conducted with the approval of the Animal Experiment Committee of the Graduate School of Letters. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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Nakamura, N., Watanabe, S., Betsuyaku, T. et al. Do birds (pigeons and bantams) know how confident they are of their perceptual decisions?. Anim Cogn 14, 83–93 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-010-0345-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-010-0345-6