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Information Seeking In Rats On The Radial Maze, Chelsea R. Kirk

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Metacognition is awareness of what one does and does not know. Students given a choice between studying material they have learned well and material they have learned poorly prefer to study the less mastered material (Metcalfe, 2009). Recent studies suggest that primates also know about the state of their own knowledge and will seek unknown information to complete a task (Call & Carpenter, 2001; Hampton et al., 2004). Two experimental paradigms can be used to test for the presence of metacognition within a species: uncertainty tasks and information seeking tasks. Uncertainty tasks ask animals to judge their confidence in the …