Metacognition

I have never written a blog before and I thought it was about time I used some of my down-time to start writing again. So here goes nothing...

I've named my blog "Deep Thought" for more reasons than one. Ironically, it didn't take too long to come up with the title. It seemed pretty obvious that people use blogs to write their own thoughts and feelings about certain events in their lives, so that is reason number one. This is somewhere where I can freely write whatever is on my mind. Reason number two; for those of you who are familiar with Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", you will know that 'Deep Thought' is the super computer created to answer the question to 'the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything'.

This then brings me to the title of my first post: Metacognition. I first heard the word back in highschool when my Psychology teacher, who also happened to be my English teacher, began talking about the concept. He summed it up by saying that metacognition was 'thinking about thinking'. At first I didn't quite understand what he was talking about but then that got me thinking more about it, which of course lead me to understand, as this very thought process was metacognition.

He then went to go on about how metacognition is what separates us humans from the animals, that our sapient brains have evolved over time in order for us to understand abstract concepts and be self-aware. So is metacognition something that defines intelligent life?

Probably not but it would be one of the criteria. Studies have shown that primates have metacognitive abilities while other animals such as birds do not. What is surprising is that recent studies have also shown that lab rats may be showing signs of metacognition. To cut a long experiment short, basically the rats were given a listening test. The rats were to determine whether the sound they heard was "long" or "short". If they answered correctly, they were rewarded with food. For an incorrect answer, they received nothing. However, they were also given the option to not answer at all, and receive a small portion of food. So in theory, the rats were able to think about their own thought processes and make judgements about their decisions.

Where there was an obvious and easy answer, such as a very short or very long sound, the rats had no problem answering the question and receiving their reward but with mid-ranged sounds, more often than not, the rats chose not to answer as they knew they didn't know the answer to begin with, deciding that a small portion of food was better than the chance of them getting the answer wrong and receiving nothing.

Again, all those Hitchhiker's fans out there would recognise the link here. Those responsible for the creation of Deep Thought were beings from another dimension, which in our dimension were seen as white mice.

So in the greater scheme of things, what does this mean? Does my dog understand his own thoughts and why he makes the decisions he does or does he just do those things out of instinct? Are we the only life form on this planet which is self-aware? Or is metacognition a dormant characteristic that can only be achieved upon reaching a certain level of evolution?