From insect cognition to sentience: Exploring the edge
Animal Sentience August 28, 2026 Catherine Macri, Martín Giurfa
What does The Edge of Sentience tell us about insect sentience and consciousness? In this commentary, we reflect on Jonathan Birch’s framework for defining and scientifically investigating sentience in animals. We discuss the methodological challenges of studying subjective experience in evolutionary distant species, and consider trace conditioning, affective states, and neural architectures as...