Information seeking by orangutans: a generalized search strategy?

Recent empirical work has suggested that some species of non-human primates may be aware of their knowledge states. One finding to support this claim is that they seek information about the location of a hidden food item when they are unsure of its location, but not when they already know where it i...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inAnimal cognition Vol. 15; no. 3; pp. 293 - 304
Main Authors Marsh, Heidi L., MacDonald, Suzanne E.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Berlin/Heidelberg Springer-Verlag 01.05.2012
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Animal cognition
Animals
Behavioral Sciences
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Cognition
Female
Food
Information retrieval
Information Seeking Behavior
Life Sciences
Male
Monkeys & apes
Orangutans
Original Paper
Photic Stimulation
Pongo abelii - psychology
Primates
Psychology Research
Search methods
Zoology
Knowledge states
Information
Orangutans
Metacognition
Online AccessGet full text
ISSN1435-9448
1435-9456
1435-9456
DOI10.1007/s10071-011-0453-y

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Summary:Recent empirical work has suggested that some species of non-human primates may be aware of their knowledge states. One finding to support this claim is that they seek information about the location of a hidden food item when they are unsure of its location, but not when they already know where it is, which purportedly demonstrates metacognition. However, this behaviour may instead reflect a generalized search strategy, in which subjects reach for food when they see it, and search for it when they do not. In this experiment, this possibility was addressed by testing orangutans in three conditions in which the location of a food item was sometimes known to subjects, and other times required subjects to visually seek the missing information. All subjects exhibited behaviour consistent with a metacognitive interpretation in at least two of the three conditions. Critically, in two of the conditions, subjects refrained from seeking visual information, and correctly found the hidden food item without ever seeing it, using inference by exclusion. The results suggest that animals that succeed in this information-seeking task are not merely acting according to a generalized search strategy, and instead seek information adaptively according to their knowledge states.
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ISSN:1435-9448
1435-9456
1435-9456
DOI:10.1007/s10071-011-0453-y