This behavioral study was undertaken to provide empirical evidence in favor of or opposed to the notion that animals across a wide breadth of the animal kingdom have subjective (personal) experience that varies with their lifestyles, ecological constraints, or phylogeny. Twelve species representing two invertebrate phyla and six vertebrate classes were observed unobtrusively in 15-min episodes,...
The growing view that consciousness is widespread, multimodal, and evolutionarily non-linear in complexity across the animal kingdom has given rise recently to a variety of strategies for representing the heterogeneous nature of animal phenomenology. While based on markers clearly associated with consciousness in humans, most of these strategies are theoretical constructs lacking empirical data...
Notwithstanding the power of the cell assembly concept, which holds that specific patterns of neuronal activity constitute the substrate of perceptual awareness that rises into consciousness, a explanatory gap remains between the phenomenological experience of consciousness and the brain processes from which that experience arises. A number of compelling and insightful theories have been...
The scientific study of consciousness has seen a resurgence in the 21st century. This collection of reviews, essays, and theories on various aspects of comparative animal consciousness takes a biological and evolutionary approach. As defined here, consciousness refers to the process by which an animal has perceptual and affective experience or feelings, arising from the material substrate of a...
Cognitive science today increasingly is coming under the influence of embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive perspectives, superimposed on the more traditional cybernetic, computational assumptions of classical cognitive research. Neuroscience has contributed to a greatly enhanced understanding of brain function within the constraints of the traditional cognitive science approach, but...