It is often said that fear is a universal innate emotion that we humans have inherited from our
mammalian ancestors by virtue of having inherited conserved features of their nervous …

Claims that plants have conscious experiences have increased in recent years and have
received wide coverage, from the popular media to scientific journals. Such claims are …

We outline a framework for evaluating scientific evidence of sentience, focusing on pain
experience. It includes eight neural and cognitive-behavioural criteria, with confidence …

Birch and colleagues have developed an important and useful framework for evaluating the
evidence for sentience–namely, the capacity to experience pain, distress and suffering, in …

A thought-provoking argument that consciousness—more widespread than previously
assumed—is the feeling of being alive, not a type of computation or a clever hack In The …

A new theory about the origins of consciousness that finds learning to be the driving force in
the evolutionary transition to basic consciousness. What marked the evolutionary transition …

This article proposes that biologically plausible theories of behavior can be constructed by
following a method of “phylogenetic refinement,” whereby they are progressively elaborated …

In debates about animal sentience, the precautionary principle is often invoked. The idea is
that when the evidence of sentience is inconclusive, we should “give the animal the benefit …

Invertebrate animals are frequently lumped into a single category and denied welfare
protections despite their considerable cognitive, behavioral, and evolutionary diversity …

Over the past two decades, Ginsburg and Jablonka have developed a novel approach to
studying the evolutionary origins of consciousness: the Unlimited Associative Learning …