Self-Doubting Monkeys Know What They Don’t Know

by Patrick Morgan

The number of traits chalked up as “distinctly human” seem to dwindle each year. And now, we can’t even say that we’re uniquely aware of the limits of our knowledge: It seems that some monkeys understand uncertainty too.

A team of researchers taught macaques how to maneuver a joystick to indicate whether the pixel density on a screen was sparse or dense. Given a pixel scenario, the monkeys would maneuver a joystick to a letter S (for sparse) or D (for dense). They were given a treat when they selected the correct answer, but when they were wrong, the game paused for a couple seconds. A third possible answer, though, allowed the monkeys to select a question mark, and thereby forgo the pause (and potentially get more treats).

And as John David Smith, a researcher at SUNY Buffalo, and Michael Beran, a researcher at Georgia State University, announced at the AAAS meeting this weekend, the macaques selected the question mark just as humans do when they encounter a mind-stumping question. As Smith told the BBC, “Monkeys apparently appreciate when they are likely to make an error…. They seem to know when they don’t know.”

These findings aren’t applicable to all species of monkeys: The researchers also trained capuchin monkeys, and this species never selected the uncertainty button. These findings may have important evolutionary implications because macaques and capuchins have different lineages: macaques are old world monkeys, and capuchins are new world monkeys.

(http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2011/02/22/self-doubting-monkeys-know-what-they-dont-know/)