Do bears know they are being hunted?

Do researchers know what they are doing?

Do animals know what they know ?

Using well-established paradigms for studying animal perception and memory, researchers have begun to ask whether animals can monitor the status of their knowledge in a behaviour al task whether they know what they know. Generally, such metacognitive ability is tested by giving animals the opportunity to avoid (or ‘escape’) a test of memory or perceptual discrimination. The pattern of escapes c...

Insect Migration: Do Migrant Moths Know Where They Are Heading?

Moth migration has been assumed to involve hitching a ride in favorable winds. A new study has shown that silver Y moths migrate only on nights when winds would displace them southward, implying that they detect their direction of movement while airborne, likely by a magnetic sense.

Progenitor cells: What do they know and when do they know it?

In the cerebral cortex, cell-fate specification and migration depend on both extrinsic and intrinsic regulation, but recent studies raise the possibility that much of the information needed to generate distinct cell types and specific migratory patterns is intrinsic to progenitor cells at early stages of development.

Metacognition in animals: how do we know that they know?

Research on animal metacognition has typically used choice discriminations whose difficulty can be varied. Animals are given some opportunity to escape the discrimination task by emitting a so-called uncertain response. The usual claim is that an animal possesses metacognition if (a) the probability of picking the uncertain response increases with task difficulty, and (b) animals are more accur...