Although evidence for animal consciousness and emotion will necessarily be indirect, insights from cognitive science promise further advances in our understanding of this fundamentally important area in animal welfare science. Conditioning paradigms can be used to enable animals to indicate their emotional state through operant responses. Knowledge of the relationship between cognition and emotion in humans generates a priori frameworks for interpreting traditional physiological and behavioural indicators of animal emotion, and provides new measures (eg cognitive bias) that gauge positive as well as negative emotions. Accurate assessment of animal emotion is crucial in animal welfare research, and cognitive science offers novel approaches that address some limitations of current measures.
They mark a departure from the search for cognitive complexity as an indicator of consciousness, which is based on questionable assumptions linking the two. Although unable to definitively answer the question of whether the animals are conscious, these studies provide fresh insights, and some could be adapted for domestic animals. In studies of metacognition and blindsight, some species show behaviour that has functional parallels with human conscious cognitive processing. Evidence for the existence of conscious and non-conscious cognitive processing in humans has inspired scientists to search for comparable processes in animals.
We argue that theory and techniques from cognitive science offer promising ways forward. Investigation of this central assumption should be one goal of animal welfare science. This is a tough question for an ELI5 because it gets into some very deep and difficult-to-answer philosophical questions like "What is sentience?" and "What kind of test could I run to confirm the presence or absence of sentience in a being that doesn't have access to language as humans know it?" You could probably spend a doctorate discussing those questions, and I most definitely don't have the answers.The assumption that animals are conscious and capable of experiencing negative sensations and emotions is at the core of most people's concerns about animal welfare. I'm not claiming that self-awareness is the same thing as sentience, or that the mirror test defines sentience - but I think they are related. Great points from a couple of people that this test relies heavily on vision, and therefore skews against certain species. Is even this sentience? I'm not sure about that either, and it's a much bigger question than we're going to be able to address in an ELI5 post.ĮDIT: Cheers, everyone. I'm not sure that animals have memories that are sophisticated enough to remember themselves and their actions in a particular past event and I'm not sure they are able to use that information to imagine situations they might face in the future and what their actions might be. It's difficult to design tests of sentience for animals who don't have a developed language (or at least one that we understand). Is that sentience? That's a much tougher question.
So far, we've only seen that apes, dolphins, orcas, magpies, and one elephant are capable of recognizing themselves as individuals by this method. If they investigate or try to remove the mark, it's considered a sign that they recognize themselves as an individual. They are put in front of a mirror when they wake up. Anaesthetized animals have a small sticker or similar mark placed on them somewhere they can't normally see. One of the tests used for self-awareness is checking whether animals recognize the image they see in a mirror as themselves (mirror self-recognition test).
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