Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
Long thought to be one of the distinguishing characteristics of humans, self-awareness has now been found to exist in other creatures, researchers from the UK’s University of Warwick claim in a new study published in the latest edition of the journal Current Zoology.
In their paper, co-author Professor Thomas Hills and colleagues from the Warwick Departments of Psychology and Philosophy explained that people and other animals that are mentally capable of simulating environments must possess at least a primitive sense of self-awareness.
Their study “strongly suggests” that sense of self is not unique to mankind, and is likely common amongst different animals, the university explained in a statement. The authors’ conclusions are based on thought experiments designed to discover which capabilities animals have to possess in order to mentally simulate their environment.
Distinguishing between real and imagined actions
Drawing inspiration from work conducted on maze navigation in rats conducted more than a half century ago, in which the rodents were observed stopping when faced with a decision, apparently deliberating which path to take, Hills and his fellow investigators came up with several different descriptive models to explain the process behind the rats’ apparent deliberation.
In one model, called the Naive Model, the researchers assumed that animals inhibit action during a simulation. However, they found that this model created false memories, because the creatures would not be able to tell the difference between a real action and an imaged one. The second one, the Self-actuating Model, solved this issue by “tagging” real versus imagined experiences.
This tagging, according to Hills and co-author Professor Stephen Butterfill from the Warwick Department of Philosophy, have dubbed this tagging “the primal self.” Their work, they wrote in their paper, demonstrates that cognitive systems which use embodied prospective foraging which require limited self-awareness must be able to distinguish actual from simulated action.
“The study’s key insight is that those animals capable of simulating their future actions must be able to distinguish between their imagined actions and those that are actually experienced,” said Hills, noting that the study “answers a very old question: do animals have a sense of self?”
“Our first aim was to understand the recent neural evidence that animals can project themselves into the future,” the professor added. “What we wound up understanding is that, in order to do so, they must have a primal sense of self. As such, humans must not be the only animal capable of self-awareness… anything, even robots, that can adaptively imagine themselves doing what they have not yet done, must be able to separate the knower from the known.”
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