Early Emergence of Metacognition in Rhesus Monkeys

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Science
• Comparative Psychology
• Primate Behavior

Background:

• Metacognition, the ability to monitor and control one's knowledge, is crucial for human cognition.
• Foundational metacognitive skills are present in human infants and develop over time.
• While animals show cognitive processes relevant to metacognition, their developmental trajectories remain unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the emergence of metacognitive information-seeking in rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta).
• To compare metacognitive performance between juvenile and adult monkeys.
• To explore developmental parallels in metacognition between primates and humans.

Main Methods:

• A one-shot information-seeking task was administered to semi-free-ranging rhesus monkeys of varying ages.
• Monkeys were presented with hidden and visible reward conditions to assess the necessity of information-seeking.
• Performance was evaluated based on information-seeking frequency, opportunity inference, and response latencies.

Main Results:

• Monkeys sought information more in the hidden condition than the visible control, indicating adaptive information-seeking.
• Juvenile monkeys demonstrated competency comparable to adults in seeking information and inferring opportunities.
• Monkeys were slower to make metacognitive inferences than to approach known rewards, with younger monkeys showing slower detection of opportunities.

Conclusions:

• Rhesus monkeys exhibit mature metacognitive features early in development, similar to human infants.
• This suggests that core metacognition may have deep evolutionary roots in primates.
• The findings support the presence of foundational metacognitive abilities across different species with shared developmental patterns.