Researchers have begun to explore animals' capacities for uncertainty
monitoring and metacognition. This exploration could extend the study of
animal self-awareness and establish the relationship of self-awareness to
other-awareness. It could sharpen descriptions of metacognition in the human
literature and suggest the earliest roots of metacognition in human
development. I will summarize research on uncertainty monitoring by humans,
monkeys, and a dolphin within perceptual and metamemory tasks. I will try to
extend phylogenetically the search for metacognitive capacities by
considering studies that have tested less cognitively sophisticated species
like rats and pigeons. By using the same uncertainty-monitoring paradigms
across species, it should be possible to map the phylogenetic distribution
of metacognition and illuminate the emergence of mind. I will discuss formal
models of animals' performances in uncertainty tasks and interpret their
performances psychologically. Low-level, stimulus-based accounts cannot
explain the phenomena. The results suggest granting animals a higher-level
decision-making process that involves criterion setting using controlled
cognitive processes. This conclusion raises the difficult question of animal
consciousness. The results show that animals have functional features of or
parallels to human conscious cognition. Remaining questions are whether
animals also have the phenomenal features that are the feeling/knowing
states of human conscious cognition, and whether the present paradigms can
be extended to demonstrate that they do. Your job will be to tell me how to
make this extension. Thus the comparative study of metacognition potentially
grounds the systematic study of animal consciousness.