Measuring the responses of non-human animals to situations of uncertainty is thought to shed light on an animal’s metacognitive processes; namely, whether they monitor their own knowledge states. For example, when presented with a foraging task, great apes and macaques selectively seek information about the location of a food item when they have not seen where it was hidden, compared to when they have. We presented this same information seeking task to ravens, in which a food item was hidden in one of three containers, and subjects could either watch where the food was hidden, infer its location through visual or auditory clues, or were given no information. We found that unlike several ape species and macaques, but similar to capuchin monkeys, the ravens looked inside at least one tube on every trial, but typically only once, inside the baited tube, when they had either witnessed it being baited or could visually infer the reward’s location. In contrast, subjects looked more often within trials in which they had not witnessed the baiting or were provided with auditory cues about the reward’s location. Several potential explanations for these ceiling levels of looking are discussed, including how it may relate to the uncertainty faced by ravens when retrieving food caches.

中文翻译：

---

调查乌鸦（乌鸦座corax）中的信息。

衡量非人类动物对不确定情况的反应被认为可以揭示动物的元认知过程。即，他们是否监视自己的知识状态。例如，当大猩猩和猕猴面临觅食任务时，有选择地寻找食物的位置信息，而与隐藏时相比，它们没有看到食物的隐藏位置。我们向乌鸦提出了相同的信息搜索任务，其中食物被藏在三个容器之一中，受试者可以观察食物被藏在什么地方，通过视觉或听觉线索推断食物的位置，或者不获取任何信息。我们发现，与几种猿类和猕猴不同，但与卷尾猴类似，在每次试验中，乌鸦都观察至少一根试管，但通常只有一次，在诱饵管内，当他们目睹诱饵被诱饵或可以从视觉上推断奖励的位置时。相比之下，在没有目睹诱饵或没有获得关于奖励位置的听觉提示的试验中，受试者看起来更多。讨论了这些最高视线水平的几种可能的解释，包括它如何与乌鸦在取回食物储存库时面临的不确定性有关。