Information Seeking in Animals: Metacognition?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Metacognition refers to humans' ability to monitor the state of their own learning and to judge the correctness of information retrieved from memory. Inferences about metacognition-like processes in non-human animals have been made from studies in which subjects judge the adequacy of previously presented information and from information seeking studies in which no prior knowledge exists. This article briefly reviews the former type of experiments but focuses on studies of information seeking. A number of studies now indicate that apes and monkeys will look down opaque tubes or under opaque containers to see the location of a hidden reward. They less often make looking responses when other information indicates the location of reward, such as visible baiting, transparent tubes or containers, or logical inference. Studies of information seeking in pigeons, rats, and dogs are reported that indicate they do not readily show the types of looking responses seen in primates. If given a forced choice between stimuli that do and do not yield information about the location of reward, however, these non-primates make the informative choice. It is suggested that the choice of information in these pigeon, rat, and dog experiments may be a form of secondary sign-tracking and thus different from the metacognition-like processes used by primates.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it