Animals 'can Think About Thought'

Monkeys can manage mathematics. Dolphins can be decisive. But US psychologists have broken new ground in the animal intelligence challenge. They have proved that animals are also smart enough to join the "don't-knows".

It means that animals, like humans, may be capable not just of thinking, but of thinking about thinking, of knowing that they don't know. Psychologists call this "metacognition", evidence of sophisticated cognitive self-awareness. Ordinary mortals know it as "dithering".

A team from the University of Buffalo, New York, the University of Montana and Georgia State University report in the December issue of Behavioural and Brain Sciences that they gave humans, bottlenose dolphins and rhesus monkeys nonverbal memory tasks. Some were hard, some easy.

"The key innovation in this research was to grant animals an 'uncertain' response so they could decline to complete any trials of their choosing," said John David Smith, of the University of Buffalo.

"Given this option animals might choose to complete trials when they are confident they know, but decline them when they feel something like uncertainty."

There is no doubt that animals can work things out. Laboratory monkeys have counted up to nine, while a New Caledonian crow at Oxford learned to bend wire into the shape of a hook to fish titbits from a bucket. These studies were evidence of thought, but not of thinking about thought.

But the evidence from the latest experiment showed that monkeys and dolphins, at least, could opt for the "uncertain" response, in a manner essentially identical to a human don't-know.