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What do you know?
Natural History, June, 2007 by Stephen Reebs
"Is that your final answer?" With such signature lines, TV quiz-show hosts inject drama into their proceedings even as they question the confidence of their contestants. Two investigators at the University of Georgia in Athens recently posed a similar question--to rats. The upshot of their query: rats might not be smarter than fifth graders (to invoke one popular show), but they do know the limits of their knowledge.
Allison L. Foote, a graduate student, and Jonathon D. Crystal, a psychologist, gave six food pellets (a big reward) to rats whenever they showed they could distinguish short sounds from long sounds by pressing the correct one of two levers. (Choosing the wrong lever yielded no reward.) The rats also learned that they could refuse to take a test and instead poke their noses into an opening in the wall of the test chamber to secure a medium reward: three pellets.
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Next, the investigators presented the rats with a series of sounds of varying length. The rats seldom declined to press a lever when the sounds were very short or very long. But when the sounds were intermediate in length--and thus harder to categorize--the rats often turned down the chance at the big reward for the sure bet of a medium reward. In sum, they acted as if they were aware of the limits of their ability. Indeed, when forced to take the test for intermediate-length sounds, they often chose the wrong lever.
Metacognition--the awareness of one's own knowledge--is difficult to study in animals because they cannot respond to questions about what they know. But now, by displaying behavioral signs of metacognition, rats join a select group previously limited to primates and dolphins. (Current Biology)
COPYRIGHT 2007 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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