Abstract: An answer to the question of animal awareness depends on evidence, not intuition, anecdote, or debate. This paper examines some of the problems inherent in an analysis of animal awareness, and whether animals might be aware of being aware is offered as a more meaningful distinction. A framework is presented which can be used to make a determination about the extent to which other species have experiences similar to ours based on their ability to make inferences and attributions about mental states in others. The evidence from both humans and animals is consistent with the idea that the capacity to use experience to infer the experience of others is a byproduct of self-awareness.

Abstract: This study tests whether the face-processing system of humans and a nonhuman primate species share characteristics that would allow for early and quick processing of socially salient stimuli: a sensitivity toward conspecific faces, a sensitivity toward highly practiced face stimuli, and an ability to generalize changes in the face that do not suggest a new identity, such as a face differently oriented. The look rates by adult tamarins and humans toward conspecific and other primate faces were examined to determine if these characteristics are shared. A visual paired comparison (VPC) task presented subjects with either a human face, chimpanzee face, tamarin face, or an object as a sample, and then a pair containing the previous stimulus and a novel stimulus was presented. The stimuli were either presented all in an upright orientation, or all in an inverted orientation. The novel stimulus in the pair was either an orientation change of the same face/object or a new example of the same type of face/object, and the stimuli were shown either in an upright orientation or in an inverted orientation. Preference to novelty scores revealed that humans attended most to novel individual human faces, and this effect decreased significantly if the stimuli were inverted. Tamarins showed preferential looking toward novel orientations of previously seen tamarin faces in the upright orientation, but not in an inverted orientation. Similarly, their preference to look longer at novel tamarin and human faces within the pair was reduced significantly with inverted stimuli. The results confirmed prior findings in humans that novel human faces generate more attention in the upright than in the inverted orientation. The monkeys also attended more to faces of conspecifics, but showed an inversion effect to orientation change in tamarin faces and to identity changes in tamarin and human faces. The results indicate configural processing restricted to particular kinds of primate faces by a New World monkey species, with configural processing influenced by life experience (human faces and tamarin faces) and specialized to process orientation changes specific to conspecific faces.

Abstract: The position advanced in this paper is that the bedrock of emotional feelings is contained within the evolved emotional action apparatus of mammalian brains. This dual-aspect monism approach to brain-mind functions, which asserts that emotional feelings may reflect the neurodynamics of brain systems that generate instinctual emotional behaviors, saves us from various conceptual conundrums. In coarse form, primary process affective consciousness seems to be fundamentally an unconditional “gift of nature” rather than an acquired skill, even though those systems facilitate skill acquisition via various felt reinforcements. Affective consciousness, being a comparatively intrinsic function of the brain, shared homologously by all mammalian species, should be the easiest variant of consciousness to study in animals. This is not to deny that some secondary processes (e.g., awareness of feelings in the generation of behavioral choices) cannot be evaluated in animals with sufficiently clever behavioral learning procedures, as with place-preference procedures and the analysis of changes in learned behaviors after one has induced re-valuation of incentives. Rather, the claim is that a direct neuroscientific study of primary process emotional/affective states is best achieved through the study of the intrinsic (“instinctual”), albeit experientially refined, emotional action tendencies of other animals. In this view, core emotional feelings may reflect the neurodynamic attractor landscapes of a variety of extended trans-diencephalic, limbic emotional action systems-including SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, PANIC, and PLAY. Through a study of these brain systems, the neural infrastructure of human and animal affective consciousness may be revealed. Emotional feelings are instantiated in large-scale neurodynamics that can be most effectively monitored via the ethological analysis of emotional action tendencies and the accompanying brain neurochemical/electrical changes. The intrinsic coherence of such emotional responses is demonstrated by the fact that they can be provoked by electrical and chemical stimulation of specific brain zones-effects that are affectively laden. For substantive progress in this emerging research arena, animal brain researchers need to discuss affective brain functions more openly. Secondary awareness processes, because of their more conditional, contextually situated nature, are more difficult to understand in any neuroscientific detail. In other words, the information-processing brain functions, critical for cognitive consciousness, are harder to study in other animals than the more homologous emotional/motivational affective state functions of the brain.