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Related Experiment Videos

The uncertain response in humans and animals

J D Smith1, W E Shields, J Schull

  • 1Department of Psychology, State University of New York at Buffalo, Amherst 14260, USA. psysmith@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu

Cognition
|January 1, 1997
PubMed
Summary

Humans and animals, including rhesus monkeys, adaptively escape from uncertainty in visual tasks. This suggests similar cognitive processes drive escape behavior when facing perceptual ambiguity.

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Area of Science:

  • Comparative psychology
  • Cognitive science
  • Animal behavior

Background:

  • Uncertainty processing is a key aspect of decision-making.
  • Previous research has not comparatively studied uncertainty processes across species.
  • Adaptive escape behavior is observed in humans but not well-understood in animals.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if animals, like humans, exhibit adaptive escape behavior when uncertain.
  • To compare human and rhesus monkey responses in visual discrimination tasks involving uncertainty.
  • To explore the cognitive mechanisms underlying escape from perceptual ambiguity.

Main Methods:

  • Two psychophysical tasks were employed: a threshold paradigm and the method of constant stimuli.
  • Human and rhesus monkey participants performed visual discrimination tasks with an escape option.
Keywords:
NASA Discipline Space Human FactorsNon-NASA Center

Related Experiment Videos

  • Escape behavior was analyzed in relation to trial difficulty and stimulus uncertainty.

    • Main Results:

    • Humans selectively escaped difficult trials inducing uncertainty in the threshold paradigm.
    • Two rhesus monkeys demonstrated similar selective escape patterns.
    • Individual differences in escape behavior were observed in both humans and monkeys across tasks.
    • Some humans and monkeys showed optimal escape, while others exhibited infrequent or non-optimal escape.

    Conclusions:

    • Escape behavior in humans and rhesus monkeys serves as a cognitive analog.
    • Adaptive escape from uncertainty may reflect controlled decisional processes.
    • Perceptual ambiguity at threshold appears to prompt these cognitive decisional processes.