Animal metacognition/consciousness
Thought this was pretty interesting:
A psychologist called David Smith, who works at the University of Buffalo in New York state, has been working for some years with a bottlenose dolphin called Natua in a harbour in Florida. He trained the animal to press buttons depending upon the frequency of the sounds it was hearing.
When the differences between the sounds was obvious, the dolphin had no problem (a snack was the reward for getting the right answer). But as the sounds to be compared got closer in frequency, to the point where even the dolphin’s impressive hearing apparatus is unable to distinguish between them, Natua learned to press a third button, effectively a ‘don’t know’ or ‘pass’ button, that moved the test on to the next ‘question.’ Similar results were found with rhesus monkeys, this time using symbols in a computer game.The tests have been refined to determine the level of confidence that the animal feels that it has the ‘right’ answer.
Smith told New Scientist in 2006: ‘I can’t claim these monkeys show fully-fledged consciousness, but I have shown the exact cognitive analogy to what we have in humans, and for us it is consciousness’.
From: “10 Questions Science Can’t Answer (Yet)” (p. 31)
