From the front lines of monkey research

I am breaking my rule against writing about the news for the second time now. Maybe it's time to give that rule up? Even if it is a sound rule, I couldn't help breaking it this once: this little story is just too good.

The story, linked below, involves computer tests for monkeys. They were asked to label a box of pixels "sparse" or "dense" -- big letters S and D on the screen -- and got a treat for a correct answer. Incorrect answers caused the program to hang, and apparently the only punishment was visible frustration at having to wait for another treat. The catch was that there was a third option that would skip immediately to the next problem, without any treat but without any pause either.

The new discovery is that for this particular game, macaque monkeys turned out to interpret that third option the same way that humans would, as a "pass" without penalty. For the researchers, this amounts to an assessment of their own knowledge, something close to the Socratic admonition to know your limits. By contrast, so-called New World monkeys like capuchin monkeys (as opposed to the macaques, which are Old World monkeys) did not choose "I don't know" at all, instead risking a pause in hopes of getting a treat even on tricky questions. They suggest that this introspection may have evolved only in the one line of apes and monkeys, which happens to be the same one that gave rise to humans. To put more fine a point on it, these creatures' introspective insight could provide us one of our own.

This is, pretty literally, fantastic, exciting stuff. It's almost on the level with 2001: a space odyssey. Sure, that's the actual conception of fundamental leaps, and here we have the mere discovery of traits that presumably developed millenia in the past; still, I figure it for kind of a big deal. If you ask me, that combination of lofty S.F. themes with the heartwarming image of a monkey munching on a cookie is a template for an excellent, shareable news story.

You can read the story here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9401000/9401945.stm