The information-seeking paradigm: Moving beyond ‘if and when’ to ‘what, where, and how.’

Abstract

Over the past two decades, researchers have explored the question of whether animals have access to their knowledge states, and further, whether they moderate their behavior in relation to this knowledge. This paper summarizes the research that has been done using the so-called 'information-seeking paradigm', pioneered by Call and Carpenter in 2001. The paper describes patterns of findings that have emerged across the primate order, alternative interpretations of these findings, and remaining questions. It closes with suggestions for further investigation in the field, with a focus on exploring the following: What types of information do animals gather? Where do they access information? And, do animals modify their search behavior depending on how informative the source is? [When] do Primates Seek Information? Nearly two decades ago, Call and Carpenter (2001) pioneered a new hiding and locating task (the 'information-seeking paradigm') to explore the question of whether non-human animals were 'metacognitive' (aware of their own cognitive states). In the task, a researcher hid a prize (food or sticker) into one of two horizontal, opaque tubes, with the ends of the tubes in front of the participant. Chimpanzees, orangutans, and young human children were given the opportunity to select a tube; if they chose correctly, they were given the prize hidden within. Critically, on some of the trials, participants were allowed to watch as the prize was being hidden. On other trials, the hiding process was blocked from participants' view. Thus, on half of the trials, participants already knew the location of the prize, and on half they did not. On all trials, however, they were allowed-but not required-to peer into the tubes to visually locate the hidden prize before making a selection. The hypothesis was that if subjects were aware of their own knowledge states (knowing or not knowing the location of the prize), they should seek information only on the trials in which they had not seen the hiding process. Searching for the prize on trials in which they had watched the hiding process would be redundant, requiring extra effort and self-imposing a delay to the retrieval of the prize. Indeed, the apes and the children in the original study behaved as predicted, gathering information significantly more often on trials in which they were lacking information than on those in which they were informed. In the ensuing years, several researchers have replicated, modified, and extended this approach with a variety of primate species, including bonobos (Call, 2010), capuchin monkeys (Basile, Hampton, Suomi,