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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
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.
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.
- 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.