Figure 5.

A signal-detection portrayal of theoretical inference within the animal-metacognition literature. Across paradigms, animals’ (a) metacognitive performances and (b) associative performances create distributed impressions of cognitive sophistication along the x-axis. Current standards of scientific inference engender a criterion point, above which performances are deemed to be metacognitive. From this criterion arise the four possible scientific outcomes: hits (metacognitive performances correctly called metacognitive), correct rejections (associative performances correctly called non-metacognitive), misses (metacognitive performances incorrectly labelled associative), and false alarms (associative performances incorrectly labelled metacognitive).