172. DO THEY KNOW THE COST?

Do animals know what they know ?

Using well-established paradigms for studying animal perception and memory, researchers have begun to ask whether animals can monitor the status of their knowledge in a behaviour al task whether they know what they know. Generally, such metacognitive ability is tested by giving animals the opportunity to avoid (or ‘escape’) a test of memory or perceptual discrimination. The pattern of escapes c...

What the Bees Know and What They Do Not Know

I. Honeycombs. The honeycomb of the bees is a loose tissue of wax forming a plane layer. The first things on it which catch one's eye are the regular hexagonal patterns on both sides. The hexagons are the openings of prismatic vessels, called bee-cells. Kepler described the shape of the bee-cells more fully. It turned out that the bottom of a cell consists of three equal rhombi as shown in Figu...

Progenitor cells: What do they know and when do they know it?

In the cerebral cortex, cell-fate specification and migration depend on both extrinsic and intrinsic regulation, but recent studies raise the possibility that much of the information needed to generate distinct cell types and specific migratory patterns is intrinsic to progenitor cells at early stages of development.

Do researchers know what they are doing?

Metacognition in animals: how do we know that they know?

Research on animal metacognition has typically used choice discriminations whose difficulty can be varied. Animals are given some opportunity to escape the discrimination task by emitting a so-called uncertain response. The usual claim is that an animal possesses metacognition if (a) the probability of picking the uncertain response increases with task difficulty, and (b) animals are more accur...