The Question of Animal Awareness Revisited
Abstract
Awareness can be thought of as the ability to imagine. I describe three lines of animal research thought to be associated with human awareness. In opaque imitation an observer is presumed to imagine that its own unseen behavior matches that of a demonstrator. In episodic memory, one can metaphorically travel back in time to imagine a past event. In acquired equivalence, two stimuli, A and B, are both associated with a common stimulus, C. Learning something new about one stimulus, A, transfers to the other stimulus, B. These and other examples suggest that some form of awareness may occur in animals.
Keywords : cognitive ethology , Donald Griffin , animal consciousness , mind , cognition