Year of Award

2016

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

Master of Arts (MA)

Degree Name

Experimental Psychology

Department or School/College

Department of Psychology

Committee Chair

Dr. Allen Szalda-Petree

Commitee Members

Dr. Stuart Hall, Dr. Bridget Clarke

Keywords

metacognition, uncertainty monitoring, confidence judgment, information processing

Subject Categories

Cognition and Perception

Abstract

In the present experiment, metacognitive confidence judgments were measured in the Sprague-dawley rats using a simultaneous discrimination task. Performance on two types of trials were compared: Forced and Choice. For Forced trials, subjects were required to classify a range of eight tones as either a “long” or “short” tone with the four longest frequency durations comprising the “long” tone category and the four shortest frequency tones comprising the “short” tone duration category. The Choice trials were identical to the Forced trials with the exception that a bailout response was also available, allowing the subject to advance to the next trial without making a discrimination response. For the Forced trials, the subjects performed as expected and made the greatest number of correct discrimination responses for the easy duration tones (e.g. the longest and shortest duration tones) and the greatest number of errors for the difficult duration tones (e.g. the intermediate duration tones). For the Choice trials, the subjects failed to demonstrate greater bailout response use for the difficult duration tones compared to the easy duration tones. The results of the present study suggest that using an auditory test discrimination may be ineffective for determining metacognitive ability in rats.

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© Copyright 2016 Jessica K. Kumm