Smith et al./Uncertainty Monitoring and Metacognition: BBS Call for Commentators

Dear Dr. Qwerty, Below is a link to the forthcoming BBS target article The Comparative Psychology of Uncertainty Monitoring and Metacognition by John D. Smith, Wendy E. Shields, and David A. Washburn http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Smith/Referees/ This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates or suggested by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please reply by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to: calls(a)bbsonline.org The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation (indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient should comment on every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply except if you wish to comment, or to suggest someone to comment. If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. An electronic list of current BBS Associates is available at this location to help you select a name: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html (please note that this list is being updated) If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime, your name, address and email address will be entered into our database as an unaffiliated investigator.) ======================================================================= IMPORTANT To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator. To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the online BBSPrints Archive, at the URL that follows the abstract below. _______________________________________________________________________ The Comparative Psychology of Uncertainty Monitoring and Metacognition John David Smith Dept. of Psychology State University of New York at Buffalo Buffalo, NY 14260 Wendy Ellen Shields University of Montana David Alan Washburn Georgia State University KEYWORDS: cognition, comparative cognition, consciousness, memory monitoring, metacognition, metamemory, self-awareness, uncertainty, uncertainty monitoring ABSTRACT: Researchers have begun to explore animals' capacities for uncertainty monitoring and metacognition. This exploration could extend the study of animal self-awareness and establish the relationship of self-awareness to other-awareness. It could sharpen descriptions of metacognition in the human literature and suggest the earliest roots of metacognition in human development. We summarize research on uncertainty monitoring by humans, monkeys, and a dolphin within perceptual and metamemory tasks. We extend phylogenetically the search for metacognitive capacities by considering studies that have tested less cognitively sophisticated species. By using the same uncertainty-monitoring paradigms across species, it should be possible to map the phylogenetic distribution of metacognition and illuminate the emergence of mind. We provide a unifying formal description of animals' performances and examine the optimality of their decisional strategies. Finally, we interpret animals' and humans' nearly identical performances psychologically. Low-level, stimulus-based accounts cannot explain the phenomena. The results suggest granting animals a higher-level decision-making process that involves criterion setting using controlled cognitive processes. This conclusion raises the difficult question of animal consciousness. The results show that animals have functional features of or parallels to human conscious cognition. Remaining questions are whether animals also have the phenomenal features that are the feeling/knowing states of human conscious cognition, and whether the present paradigms can be extended to demonstrate that they do. Thus the comparative study of metacognition potentially grounds the systematic study of animal consciousness. http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Smith/Referees/ ====================================================================== IMPORTANT Please do not prepare a commentary yet. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the article. We will then let you know whether it was possible to include your name on the final formal list of invitees. ======================================================================= *** SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENT *** (1) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review. (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential impact!). *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Please note: Your email address has been added to our user database for Calls for Commentators, the reason you received this email. If you do not wish to receive further Calls, please feel free to change your mailshot status through your User Login link on the BBSPrints homepage, using your username and password. Or, email a response with the word "remove" in the subject line. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Ralph BBS ------------------------------------------------------------------- Ralph DeMarco Editorial Coordinator Behavioral and Brain Sciences Journals Department Cambridge University Press 40 West 20th Street New York, NY 10011-4211 UNITED STATES bbs(a)bbsonline.org http://www.bbsonline.org Tel: +001 212 924 3900 ext.374 Fax: +001 212 645 5960 -------------------------------------------------------------------