ABSTRACT
There is evidence that nonhuman animals that have not evolved a mindreading capacity, such as macaques and rodents, are nevertheless able to appropriately evaluate their self-confidence level in perceptual and memory tasks. This chapter discusses the view that metacognition is self-directed metarepresentation. Meta-knowledge-strong is a class of views that take metacognition to involve some form or other of metarepresentation. Finally, the similarity of pattern in uncertainty responses in humans and in rhesus monkeys indicates that a metarepresentational account is justified in both cases. The chapter also discusses the "no-metacognition" view, which claims that animals merely rely on observable stimuli – such as an oscillating behavior – or on anticipated reward to decide what to do. It presents the "experience-based" accounts, in which metacognition is neither a mere matter of first-order cognition, nor of metarepresentation. The chapter proposes that animal metacognition depends on a non-propositional evaluative attitude called affordance-sensing, which is common to human and some nonhuman cognitive systems.
