The ability to monitor one’s own cognitive processes is considered a form of metacognition ( 1, 2). To aid in this estimation, humans are able to monitor their degree of uncertainty and use that knowledge to improve their decisions ( 1, 2). Often a correct choice can only be estimated rather than absolutely known. To better frame metacognition as an issue for neurobiological investigation, we propose a neurobiological hypothesis of uncertainty monitoring based on the known circuitry of the honey bee brain. We discuss whether these behavioral results prove bees react to uncertainty or whether associative mechanisms can explain such findings. This finding has been considered as evidence that nonhuman animals can assess the certainty of a predicted outcome, and bees’ performance was comparable to that of primates in a similar paradigm. Our data show that bees selectively avoid difficult tasks they lack the information to solve. Bees could also transfer the concept of opting out to a novel task. Bees opted out more often on difficult trials, and opting out improved their proportion of successful trials.
#Cover orange 2 level 4 trial#
Free-flying bees were rewarded for a correct choice, punished for an incorrect choice, or could avoid choosing by exiting the trial (opting out). To explore this issue, we examined how honey bees ( Apis mellifera) responded to a visual discrimination task that varied in difficulty between trials. Humans seek more information and defer choosing when they realize they have insufficient information to make an accurate decision, but whether animals are aware of uncertainty is currently highly contentious. Human decision-making strategies are strongly influenced by an awareness of certainty or uncertainty (a form of metacognition) to increase the chances of making a right choice.
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