Michael Beran - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Michael Beran

Trends and Prospects …, Jan 1, 2010

Research in non-human animal (hereafter, animal) cognition has found strong evidence that some an... more Research in non-human animal (hereafter, animal) cognition has found strong evidence that some animal species are capable of meta-cognitively monitoring their mental states. They know when they know and when they do not know. In contrast, animals have generally not shown robust theory of mind (ToM) capabilities. Comparative research uses methods that are non-verbal, and thus might easily be labelled 'implicit'using the terminology of traditional human cognition.

Journal of …, Jan 1, 2009

Some studies of nonhuman animals' metacognitive capacity encourage competing low-level, behaviora... more Some studies of nonhuman animals' metacognitive capacity encourage competing low-level, behavioral descriptions of trial-decline responses by animals in uncertainty-monitoring tasks. To evaluate the force of these behavioral descriptions, the authors presented 6 capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) with 2 density discrimination tasks between sparse and dense stimuli. In one task, difficult trials with stimuli near the middle of the density continuum could be declined through an "uncertainty" response. In the other task, making a "middle" response to the same stimuli was rewarded. In Experiment 1, capuchins essentially did not use the uncertainty response, but they did use the middle response. In Experiment 2, the authors replicated this result with 5 of 6 monkeys while equating the overall pace and reinforcement structure of the 2 tasks, although 1 monkey also showed appropriate use of the uncertainty response. These results challenge a purely associative interpretation of some uncertainty-monitoring performances by monkeys while sharpening the theoretical question concerning the nature of the psychological signal that occasions uncertainty responses.

Behavioral and Brain …, Jan 1, 2009

Abstract We agree with Carruthers that evidence for metacognition in species lacking mindreading ... more Abstract We agree with Carruthers that evidence for metacognition in species lacking mindreading provides dramatic evidence in favor of the metacognition-is-prior account and against the mindreading-is-prior account. We discuss this existing evidence and explain why an evolutionary perspective favors the former account and poses serious problems for the latter account.

Abstract Humans feel uncertain. They know when they do not know. These feelings and the responses... more Abstract Humans feel uncertain. They know when they do not know. These feelings and the responses to them ground the research literature on metacognition. It is a natural question whether animals share this cognitive capacity, and thus animal metacognition has become an influential research area within comparative psychology. Researchers have explored this question by testing many species using perception and memory paradigms.

Humans frequently encounter situations filled with uncertainty. Consider the plight of students t... more Humans frequently encounter situations filled with uncertainty. Consider the plight of students taking multiple-choice exams. When they encounter easy questions for which they know the answer, they immediately respond. They know that they know, and use that knowledge to make a quick and confident decision. When they encounter a difficult question, they often recognize their own uncertainty. They know that they do not know, and use that information to engage in different response strategies.

In the mystery Silver Blaze, Sherlock Holmes draws the detective's attention to the curious incid... more In the mystery Silver Blaze, Sherlock Holmes draws the detective's attention to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. The detective reminds him that the dog did nothing in the night-time. Holmes replies: That was the curious incident. The incident is an important clue to the mystery's solution.

Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews, 2009

… and Behavior Reviews, Jan 1, 2009

Researchers have begun to evaluate whether nonhuman animals share humans' capacity for metacognit... more Researchers have begun to evaluate whether nonhuman animals share humans' capacity for metacognitive monitoring and self-regulation. Using perception, memory, numerical, and foraging paradigms, they have tested apes, capuchins, a dolphin, macaques, pigeons, and rats. However, recent theoretical and formal-modeling work has confirmed that some paradigms allow the criticism that low-level associative mechanisms could create the appearance of uncertainty monitoring in animals. This possibility has become a central issue as researchers reflect on existing phenomena and pause to evaluate the area's current status. The present authors discuss the associative question and offer our evaluation of the field. Associative mechanisms explain poorly some of the area's important results. The next phase of research in this area should consolidate the gains achieved by those results and work toward a theoretical understanding of the cognitive and decisional (not associative) capacities that animals show in some of the referent experiments.

… bulletin & review, Jan 1, 2008

Results that point to animals' metacognitive capacity bear a heavy burden, given the potential fo... more Results that point to animals' metacognitive capacity bear a heavy burden, given the potential for competing behavioral descriptions. In this article, formal models are used to evaluate the force of these descriptions. One example is that many existing studies have directly rewarded so-called uncertainty responses. Modeling confirms that this practice is an interpretative danger because it supports associative processes and encourages simpler interpretations. Another example is that existing studies raise the concern that animals avoid difficult stimuli not because of uncertainty monitored, but because of aversion given error-causing or reinforcementlean stimuli. Modeling also justifies this concern and shows that this problem is not addressed by the common practice of comparing performance on chosen and forced trials. The models and related discussion have utility for metacognition researchers and theorists broadly, because they specify the experimental operations that will best indicate a metacognitive capacity in humans or animals by eliminating alternative behavioral accounts.

Journal of …, Jan 1, 2010

Some metacognition paradigms for nonhuman animals encourage the alternative explanation that anim... more Some metacognition paradigms for nonhuman animals encourage the alternative explanation that animals avoid difficult trials based only on reinforcement history and stimulus aversion. To explore this possibility, we placed humans and monkeys in successive uncertainty-monitoring tasks that were qualitatively different, eliminating many associative cues that might support transfer across tasks. In addition, task transfer occurred under conditions of deferred and rearranged feedback-both species completed blocks of trials followed by summary feedback. This ensured that animals received no trial-by-trial reinforcement. Despite distancing performance from associative cues, humans and monkeys still made adaptive uncertainty responses by declining the most difficult trials. These findings suggest that monkeys' uncertainty responses could represent a higher-level, decisional process of cognitive monitoring, though that process need not involve full selfawareness or consciousness. The dissociation of performance from reinforcement has theoretical implications concerning the status of reinforcement as the critical binding force in animal learning.

Inferring the evolutionary history of cognitive abilities requires large and diverse samples. How... more Inferring the evolutionary history of cognitive abilities requires large and diverse samples. However, such samples are often beyond the reach of individual researchers or institutions, and studies are often limited to small numbers of species. Consequently, methodological and site-specific-differences across studies can limit comparisons between species. Here we introduce the ManyPrimates project, which addresses these challenges by providing a large-scale collaborative framework for comparative studies in primate cognition. To demonstrate the viability of the project we conducted a case study of short-term memory. In this initial study, we were able to include 176 individuals from 12 primate species housed at 11 sites across Africa, Asia, North America and Europe. All subjects were tested in a delayedresponse task using consistent methodology across sites. Individuals could access food rewards by remembering the position of the hidden reward after a 0, 15, or 30-second delay. Overall, individuals performed better with shorter delays, as predicted by previous studies. Phylogenetic analysis revealed a strong phylogenetic signal for short-term memory. Although, with only 12 species, the validity of this analysis is limited, our initial results demonstrate the feasibility of a large, collaborative open-science project. We present the

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 2021

The letter height superiority effect reveals that human adults judge letters to be taller than id... more The letter height superiority effect reveals that human adults judge letters to be taller than identically sized pseudoletters. This effect extends to words, such that words are estimated to be greater in size or lasting longer in duration than pseudowords of the same size or those presented for the same duration. The physical properties of letters and words also impact their perceived size, such that higher contrast between figure-ground stimuli leads to greater size estimates. Specifically, black letters on a white background (high contrast between figure and ground) are judged to be taller than gray letters and gray pseudoletters on a white background (low contrast between figure and ground) for adult humans. In the current study, we assessed whether this effect would extend to nonverbal stimuli (shapes) such that high-contrast shapes would lead to greater size estimates relative to low-contrast shapes for human children and rhesus monkeys in a two-choice discrimination task. We found that children and monkeys tended to overestimate the size of high-contrast shapes relative to low-contrast shapes consistent with results reported among human adults. Implications for perceptual fluency and its impact on subjective size estimates are discussed.

International Journal of Comparative Psychology, 2018

Thirteen naïve capuchin monkeys (Cebus [Sapajus] apella) were manually tested with the Transfer I... more Thirteen naïve capuchin monkeys (Cebus [Sapajus] apella) were manually tested with the Transfer Index procedure, a species-fair paradigm for assessing the capacity to learn and to transfer learning. The animals were then trained to manipulate a joystick to control a cursor and to respond to stimuli on a computer screen. After the animals had mastered the remote cause-effect relations required by the computerized test system, they were returned to manual Transfer Index testing to determine whether the joystick-training intervention had affected the monkeys’ capacity for efficient and relational learning. Transfer Index scores and overall accuracy was higher following the joystick intervention, but these differences were not statistically significant. Two-choice discrimination learning and reversal appeared to be associative in nature, and there was no evidence that joystick training made the monkeys more rule-like or relational in their learning. Despite the absence of significant di...

The field of primate cognition studies how primates, including humans, perceive, process, store, ... more The field of primate cognition studies how primates, including humans, perceive, process, store, retrieve, and use information to guide decision making and other behavior. Much of this research is motivated by a desire to understand how these abilities evolved. Large and diverse samples from a wide range of species are vital to achieving this goal. In reality, however, primate cognition research suffers from small sample sizes and is often limited to a handful of species, which constrains the evolutionary inferences we can draw. We conducted a systematic review of primate cognition research published between 2014 and 2019 to quantify the extent of this problem. Across 574 studies, the median sample size was 7 individuals. Less than 15% of primate species were studied at all, and only 19% of studies included more than one species. Further, the species that were studied varied widely in how much research attention they received, partly because a small number of test sites contributed ...

Animal Behavior and Cognition, 2018

The ego-depletion hypothesis states that self-control diminishes over time and with exertion. How... more The ego-depletion hypothesis states that self-control diminishes over time and with exertion. However, there is mixed evidence among human adult and comparative studies as to whether such depletion occurs. It is an important issue, given that evidence for or against this hypothesis could have implications for remediation efforts with individuals who show high impulsivity and low self-control. In a study of potential depletion effects on selfcontrol, capuchin monkeys were presented with two consecutive self-control tasks back-to-back within sessions. Monkeys first completed the accumulation task, in which they were presented with food items one-by-one until the subject retrieved and ate the accumulating items, at which point no more food would be delivered. This required continual inhibition of food retrieval in the face of an increasingly desirable reward. Then, monkeys completed a food exchange task with exchange combinations that either decreased or increased in food quality. Self-control was required in foregoing eating an immediately available food for a potentially better reward later in the trial. Individual differences in accumulation performance were observed, but no depletion effects were seen in the monkeys' exchange performance. Next, monkeys were presented with task order counterbalanced across individuals. No order effects were observed in the monkeys' performance on either self-control task. Monkeys' exchange performance was not significantly correlated with accumulation performance in either experiment. These results indicate no depletion effects and that these tasks may not be related in terms of underlying mechanisms that support self-control performance, even though at face value both require inhibition of eating available food.

Animal Behavior and Cognition, 2015

Many animals cooperate with one another to achieve outcomes that they could not obtain on their o... more Many animals cooperate with one another to achieve outcomes that they could not obtain on their own. One form of cooperation that has received much attention but little empirical support from experimental studies is reciprocity, leaving open the question of whether animals will work to provide benefits to others. Although there is some evidence of reciprocal behavior in animals, early work in macaque monkeys showed that while they would initially work to pay another individual (who could then return the favor), they ceased doing so over time. Here, we extended this investigation of reciprocity to capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella), a species known for cooperating and providing each other with rewards in other contexts. We investigated whether capuchin monkeys would engage in a dual computer task that required alternating work by two animals, such that food rewards earned by one individual were delivered to the partner. Unlike previous research, capuchin monkeys sustained work on the task when their actions benefited only another monkey, even with progressively longer delays between the subject's actions that rewarded the partner and the partner's subsequent actions that rewarded the subject. A separate question was the degree to which subjects understood their actions as social. We assessed whether subjects' behaviors were influenced by the presence or absence of a partner. Subjects behaved differently in the two conditions, indicating that future research investigating what subjects understand about their partners is warranted.

Behavioural processes, 2016

Recent studies of delay of gratification in capuchin monkeys using a rotating tray (RT) task have... more Recent studies of delay of gratification in capuchin monkeys using a rotating tray (RT) task have shown improved self-control performance in these animals in comparison to the accumulation (AC) task. In this study, we investigated whether this improvement resulted from the difference in methods between the rotating tray task and previous tests, or whether it was the result of greater overall experience with delay of gratification tasks. Experiment 1 produced similar performance levels by capuchins monkeys in the RT and AC tasks when identical reward and temporal parameters were used. Experiment 2 demonstrated a similar result using reward amounts that were more similar to previous AC experiments with these monkeys. In Experiment 3, monkeys performed multiple versions of the AC task with varied reward and temporal parameters. Their self-control behavior was found to be dependent on the overall delay to reward consumption, rather than the overall reward amount ultimately consumed. The...