The Self and Other: A Missing Link in Comparative Social Cognition

The chapter is an extension of Hampton's approach of asking a monkey to respond metacognitively. It focuses on confidence judgments, which in humans are typically made verbally. It describes an experiment on rhesus macaque monkeys. These monkeys were given the opportunity to express their confidence by placing bets on the accuracy of their tasks in a cognitive task. The subjects were required to respond on all trials, easy and hard. After each trial, subjects were required to select a high- or a low-confidence icon. Having shown that the subjects chose the high- and low-confidence icons appropriately, this chapter argues that the metacognitive ability of monkeys is similar to that observed in human subjects in experiments that use the confidence judgment paradigm. Judgment of learning asks how certain they are that they will be able to remember a recently learned item in the future.