Animal Cognition & Consciousness (II): Metacognition & Mentalizing

As I wrote in my last post, three kinds of behaviours are most often discussed in debates about animal consciousness and cognition:

“1. Mirror self-recognition
2. Tests of metacognition;
3. Metacognition of others’ mental states” (Gómez 2009: 45)

After having discussed the first capacitiy in my previous post, I will discuss the latter two in this post, starting with metacognition, that is being aware of one’s own knowledge states, and then turn to being aware of other’s mental states.

Metacognition.

Being aware of one’s own mental states, i.e., reflective consciousness, surely seems to be one of the most crucial components of self-awareness. In one paradigm used to test for metacognitive awareness, monkeys were trained to select, out of a number of two or more images, the one that is identical to an image they have been shown earlier. As is to expected, the monkeys’ performance progressively deteriorated the longer the delay was between the sample image and the selection task.

Animal Cognition & Consciousness (I): Mirror Self-Recognition

Darwin made a mistake. At least that is what Derek Penn and his colleagues (2008) claim in a recent and controversial paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Darwin (1871) famously argued that the difference between humans and animals was “one of degree, not of kind.”

This, according to Penn et al. is of course true from an evolutionary perspective, but in their view,

“the profound biological continuity between human and nonhuman animals masks an equally profound discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds” (Penn et al. 2008: 109).

They hold that humans are not simply smarter, but human cognition differs fundamentally and qualitatively from that of other animals.

One pervasive proposal is that we do not simply possess a unique set of cognitive capacities, but that it might be consciousness itself that is uniquely human as well, a view that goes back at least to Descartes (Burkhardt & Bekoff 2009: 41). However, there are also many scholars and researchers who agree that there is evidence for higher-order cognition in nonhuman animals ( ‘animals’ after this) and that they might possess at least some degree of consciousness (Burkhard & Bekoff 2009: 40f.).

In this and my next post, I will write about three kinds of phenomena that are most often discussed in debates on whether animals have some form of higher-order cognition and consciousness or not: self-awareness, awareness of one’s own cognitive states, and awareness of others’ cognitive states and intentions.