by: Jacky Hui
Meta-memory is a term used to describe the mental processes involved in recollecting past thoughts, feelings and actions. If you think back to your last birthday party, you would be employing a form of meta-memory as you recall what happened and how it made you feel at the time. Our capacity to reflect on the past, plan for the future, and choose whether or not to act in the present are all examples of meta-memory. When faced with a challenging decision, reflecting on the past or visualizing potential futures can be one approach to help make it easier. This enables us to make better decisions and feel good about them as well! Does this indicate that animals have meta-memory ?
Animals display a variety of remarkable cognitive skills. Some creatures’ human-like skills astound us. We are constantly in awe of others because their abilities are so superior to our own. Because evolution has specialized these abilities to address the issues that animals encounter in their physical and social environments, each species has a distinct constellation of cognitive abilities.
For example, For instance, a honey bee dances frantically within a hive. As she dances, other bees congregate nearby and touch her body with their forelegs and antennae. Then, one by one, the onlookers leave the dance, make their way to the entrance of the hive, and then move off in the same direction. A plentiful food source’s orientation and distance have just been transmitted by the dancing bee. Within an hour, the foragers are back, prepared to tell other foragers where the resource is by performing their own dances. In this example we see that bees use meta memory by remembering the information the dance gave them in order to locate food
Another example can be found in a recently, a study was conducted to find out whether or not birds possess the ability to be aware of their own memories. The study involved training pigeons with a visual discrimination task, where the birds were shown pairs of images and had to choose which one matched the first one by pecking on it. At the end of each trial, the pigeon would receive reinforcement for choosing correctly or for choosing incorrectly. In this study birds were matching images by thinking of their memory of the previous image.
Overall, animals are amazing beings whose abilities aren’t understood by us humans. Animals have proven to be more intelligent than we ever thought. Maybe the old saying animals can’t reason is a little bit off. They might not have the same brain capacity as human beings, but there’s no denying their intelligence. With an ability to retain knowledge and recall events with startling detail, it seems like animals are just as good as people at recalling past experiences. Even though animal minds may be different from ours, they still display many of the same characteristics-which suggests they too must possess some level of memory. What this means for our world remains to be seen-but it certainly makes one wonder if animals have something similar to meta-memory (the ability to reflect on thoughts or feelings) in their own way.
