An Ecological Study of Uncertainty Monitoring in the Rat

The purpose of the study was to investigate Schull, Smith, and\ud Washburn's findings that rats were unable to monitor their own \ud uncertainty states unlike Humans, Rhesus Monkeys, and the Bottlenosed Dolphin. \ud The researchers point to literature that reveal shortcomings in efforts \ud to show metacognition in young children as analogous to faults in the \ud Schull, Smith, and Washburn study. Children had difficulty monitoring \ud their own uncertainty states when presented with problems that were \ud propositionally represented but were successful when problems were represented \ud by concrete stimuli (Byrnes & Overton, 1986). Rats might also benefit \ud from more concretely represented problems. Presenting rats with more \ud concrete and ecologically appropriate stimuli in a test for uncertainty \ud monitoring might reveal the rats ability to monitor their own uncertainty \ud states. In the present study, experimenters hypothesized that, given a \ud discrimination task, the rats would "bailout" when the information provided was \ud too ambiguous to perform above chance on the task. The results indicated \ud that the animals did not use the "bailout" response systematically as stimuli \ud became more ambiguous. The animals did, however, performed well on the \ud discrimination task in easier\ud trials