Don't look back on failure: spontaneous uncertainty monitoring in chimpanzees.

Abstract

During computer-controlled cognitive tasks, chimpanzees often look up at the food dispenser, which activates at the same time as feedback for the correct choice but not for feedback for the incorrect choice. Do these "looking back" behaviors also indicate signs of spontaneous monitoring of their confidence in their choices? To address this question, we delayed the feedback for 1 s after their choice responses and observed their look-back behaviors during the delay period. Two chimpanzees looked up at the food dispenser significantly less frequently when their choice was incorrect (but the feedback was not given) than when it was correct. These look-back behaviors have not been explicitly trained under experimental contexts. Therefore, these results indicate that chimpanzees spontaneously change the frequency of their look-back behaviors in response to the correctness or incorrectness of their own choices, even without external feedback, suggesting that their look-back behaviors may reflect the level of "confidence" or "uncertainty" of their responses immediately before.