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Do animals know that they know?
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Do animals know that they know?
From cooperative behaviours to hiding one’s food from conspecifics, many animal species seem to act in a way that would suggest they can understand the intentions of others and their consequences. There has been a number of studies looking into whether different species can recognize themselves in a mirror, be aware of their own self or to know whether they consciously remember something, abilities that usually fall under the definition of meta-cognition. However, this field of research also faces a number of problems including unclear definition of terms, problematic behavioural proxies or anthropomorphising. To hopefully cut through some of the confusion in this area, we will discuss different experiments that have claimed to find evidence for meta-cognition in animals and what the evidence looks like. If you want to learn which animal species looks best in the mirror, this is the episode for you!
Amendments to the episode:
As we are definitely not as good at memorizing things as pinyon jays, we did make a few mistakes in names during the episode (huge apologies to the authors of the articles and experiments, who have put many and many hours into their work only for some students to not be able to remember who did what). These are the mistakes we have picked up on:
1. We mentioned that the mirror and mark test done with dolphins was authored by Herman et al. While Herman with colleagues did many experiments on dolphin cognition, this specific one was done by Reiss & Marino (2001).
2. There was also some confusion as to mirror tests with corvids (sorry corvids, we love you). Prior et al. (2008) did a mirror and mark test with magpies. Dally et al. (2010) did an experiment with western scrub jays which did not treat their mirror image as conspecific during caching.
We couldn't fit all the references here so please explore this Google Doc if you are eager to learn more:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Iki4AgOKuz_1bOiu1JnWmL4nvc1lbP2WUaO-GW7MBSQ/edit?usp=sharing
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