Cognition and Perception Commons^™

Going Beyond Just-So Stories, Brian Key

Animal Sentience

Colloquial arguments for fish feeling pain are deeply rooted in anthropometric tendencies that confuse escape responses to noxious stimuli with evidence for consciousness. More developed arguments often rely on just-so stories of fish displaying complex behaviours as proof of consciousness. In response to commentaries on the idea that fish do not feel pain, I raise the need to go beyond just-so stories and to rigorously analyse the neural circuitry responsible for specific behaviours using new and emerging technologies in neuroscience. By deciphering the causal relationship between neural information processing and conscious behaviour, it should be possible to assess cogently the …

Falsifying The Null Hypothesis That “Fish Do Not Feel Pain", Brian Key

Animal Sentience

The reader of Animal Sentience may surmise that because the weight of the commentaries on my target article, “Why fish do not feel pain,” is leaning towards not supporting my argument, it follows that the premise "fish do not feel pain" is incorrect. However, science does not prevail by popular opinion. History is plagued with numerous (and often widely accepted) examples of biological phenomena being explained by mysterious forces. In the absence of a mechanistic understanding, the many different guises of vitalism (the principle that life involves a vital energy) are often invoked to explain the unknown. Spurious …

An Invertebrate Perspective On Pain, Jennifer A. Mather

Animal Sentience

Although Key (2016) argues that mammals feel pain and fish do not, from an invertebrate perspective, it is obvious that the pain experience is shared by animals from a number of different animal groups.

Sentience And Animal Welfare: New Thoughts And Controversies, Donald M. Broom

Animal Sentience

Sentience involves having some degree of awareness but awareness of self is not as complex as some people believe. Fully functioning vertebrate animals, and some invertebrates, are sentient but neither humans nor non-humans are sentient early in development or if brain-damaged. Feelings are valuable adaptive mechanisms and an important part of welfare but are not all of welfare so the term welfare refers to all animals, not just to sentient animals. We have much to learn about what non-human animals want from us, the functioning of the more complex aspects of their brains and of our brains and how we …

Cortex Necessary For Pain — But Not In Sense That Matters, Adam J. Shriver

Animal Sentience

Certain cortical regions are necessary for pain in humans in the sense that, at particular times, they play a direct role in pain. However, it is not true that they are necessary in the more important sense that pain is never possible in humans without them. There are additional details from human lesion studies concerning functional plasticity that undermine Key’s (2016) interpretation. Moreover, no one has yet identified any specific behaviors that mammalian cortical pain regions make possible that are absent in fish.

Why Is Fish “Feeling” Pain Controversial?, E. Don Stevens

Animal Sentience

In his excellent target article, Key (2016) develops a mechanistic argument in an attempt to show why it is unlikely that fish can “feel” pain or for that matter, “feel” anything. The topic is controversial and likely to achieve the goal of getting many hits for the inaugural issue of the new journal, Animal Sentience. In my view, the question is unlikely to be answered, for two reasons. First, because the proponents of the “fish feel pain” controversy are untrained and unskilled in the details and jargon of neurophysiology and/or neuroanatomy, and the opponents of the controversy, like Key, …

Fish Pain: A Painful Topic, Carl Safina

Animal Sentience

If fish cannot feel pain, why do stingrays have purely defensive tail spines that deliver venom? Stingrays’ ancestral predators are fish. And why do many fishes possess defensive fin spines, some also with venom that produces pain in humans? These things did not evolve just in case sentient humans would evolve millions of years later and then invent scuba. If fish react purely unconsciously to “noxious” stimuli, why aren’t sharp jabbing spines enough? Why also stinging venom?

How Welfare Biology And Commonsense May Help To Reduce Animal Suffering, Yew-Kwang Ng

Animal Sentience

Welfare biology is the study of the welfare of living things. Welfare is net happiness (enjoyment minus suffering). Since this necessarily involves feelings, Dawkins (2014) has suggested that animal welfare science may face a paradox, because feelings are very difficult to study. The following paper provides an explanation for how welfare biology could help to reduce this paradox by answering some difficult questions regarding animal welfare. Simple means based on commonsense could reduce animal suffering enormously at low or even negative costs to humans. Ways to increase the influence of animal welfare advocates are also discussed, focusing initially on farmed …

Is Sentience Only A Nonessential Component Of Animal Welfare?, Ian J.H. Duncan

Animal Sentience

According to Broom (2014), animal welfare is a concept that can be applied to all animals, including single-celled organisms that are obviously not sentient. Such a stance makes it difficult to draw a connection between welfare and sentience, and that is the book’s downfall. Some excellent points are made about sentience and there are very good discussions on animal welfare. However, unless sentience is considered the essential component of welfare, any attempt to link the two phenomena will be unsuccessful — and that, indeed, is the case with this book.

Why Animal Welfarism Continues To Fail, Lori Marino

Animal Sentience

Welfarism prioritizes human interests over the needs of nonhuman animals. Despite decades of welfare efforts other animals are mostly worse off than ever before, being subjected to increasingly invasive and harmful treatments, especially in the factory farming and biomedical research areas. A legal rights-based approach is essential in order for other animals to be protected from the varying ethical whims of our species.

The Influence Of Freedom And Choice In Action Selection And The Valence Of Action-Outcomes On The Sense Of Agency, Zeynep Barlas Wilfrid Laurier University

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Sense of agency (SoA) refers to the subjective experience that one is the author of their actions and the ensuing outcomes of these actions. Previous research have suggested that both sensorimotor processes and high level inferences can contribute to the SoA. In five experiments, the present thesis examined the effects of action selection processes and the valence of action-outcomes on the SoA. The majority of these experiments measured the SoA by obtaining both subjective feeling of control (FoC) judgments over the action-outcomes, and assessing the size of intentional binding. Intentional binding refers to the perceived temporal attraction between actions and …

Cognitive Complexity, Mindfulness, And Reflection In Mental Health Professionals, Dharshini Goonetilleke

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

In this cross sectional quantitative investigation, the relationships among mental health professionals' cognitive complexity, mindfulness, and reflection were explored. To determine if there was a correlation between mindfulness and cognitive complexity, a Pearson's correlation was conducted: There was a strong positive correlation between mindfulness and cognitive complexity. To determine whether observing and describing (two key variables of mindfulness) could predict counselor overall cognitive complexity, a simultaneous multiple regression was conducted. The observing subscale significantly predicted counselor cognitive complexity and the describing subscale did not significantly predict mindfulness. To determine if there is a correlation between mindfulness and reflection, a Pearson's …

Multisensory Cue Congruency In Lane Change Test, Yuanjing Sun

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Nowadays, a driver interacts with multiple systems while driving. Multimodal in-vehicle technologies (e.g., Personal Navigation Devices) intend to facilitate multitasking while driving. Multimodality enables to reduce cognitive effort in information processing, but not always. The present study aims to investigate how/when auditory cues could improve driver responses to a visual target. We manipulated three dimensions (spatial, semantic, and temporal) of verbal and nonverbal cues to interact with visual spatial instructions. Multimodal displays were compared with unimodal (visual-only) displays to see whether they would facilitate or degrade a vehicle control task. Twenty-six drivers participated in the Auditory-Spatial Stroop experiment using a …

Cognitive And Behavioral Mechanisms Underlying Alcohol-Induced Risky Driving, Jennifer R. Laude

Theses and Dissertations--Psychology

Alcohol intoxication represents one situation an individual might increase their amount of risk taking when driving. This dissertation is comprised of three studies that investigate the mechanisms by which alcohol increases driver risk-taking. Study 1 examined the effect of alcohol on driver risk-taking using a proxemics approach. The study also tested whether alcohol-induced increases in risky driving co-occurred with pronounced impairment in the driver’s skill. The study also examined whether the most disinhibited drivers were also the riskiest. Indeed, alcohol increased driver risk-taking and impaired driving skill. The study also revealed risky driving can be dissociable from impairing effects on …

The Effects Of Construal Level On Stigmatizing Attitudes Toward An Individual With Mental Illness, Jeremy Glenn Gay

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

People with mental illness often face stigmatization by society. However, little research has examined cognitive factors that may activate or dissipate stigmatizing attitudes toward those with mental illness. Construal level, or the extent that people focus on abstract generalizations versus concrete details of events, may be one such cognitive factor. Two contradictory hypotheses emerged concerning how construal may affect stigmatizing attitudes. One hypothesis suggests that abstract construals will decrease stigmatization because abstract construals tend to increase the activation of similar goals, thus leading to a similarity focus. In contrast, another hypothesis suggests that abstract construals will increase stigmatization because abstract …

How Can We Build A Moral Robot?, Kristen E. Clark

Capstones

Artificial intelligence is already starting to drive our cars and make choices that affect the world economy. One day soon, we’ll have robots that can take care of our sick and elderly, and even rescue us in rescue us in emergencies. But as robots start to make decisions that matter—it’s raising questions that go far beyond engineering. We’re stating to think about ethics.

Bertram Malle and Matthias Scheutz are part of a team funded by the department of defense. It's their job to answer a question that seems straight out of a sci-fi novel: How can we build a moral …

Detecting Changes In Auditory Events, Rachael B. Peck

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Change deafness is defined as the failure to detect the source of an above-threshold change in an auditory scene. A new paradigm recently demonstrated the phenomenon under analogous conditions to its visual counterpart, change blindness (Hall, Peck, Gaston, & Dickerson, 2015). This investigation examined the use of the paradigm through two experiments which involved the same four simultaneously presented events. Experiment 1 distributed events across a virtual 120º on the azimuth while the target event oscillated across a 60º space throughout each trial. Listeners were instructed to identify the target as soon as possible. Target rate of change was manipulated …

The Impact Of Globalization On Access For Individuals With Disabilities, Katherine Williamson

Honors Theses

This comparative ethnomethodology study is focused on the global context elements that help explain public policies and its consequences on types of access available to individuals with disabilities in the United States Midwest and West Africa. The goal of this study is to identify the role of individuals with disabilities in a global society by answering two research questions. First, what are the public policies in place for physical, social, and educational access in the United States Midwest and West Africa? Second, how is physical, social, and educational access being provided in the United States Midwest and West Africa? The …

The Effects Of Mindfulness On Verbal Distress Disclosure, Sara Fleming

USC Aiken Psychology Theses

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of a mindfulness induction on participants’ verbal distress disclosure (as measured by the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count and State Disclosure Questionnaire). Participants were 86 undergraduate students enrolled in an Introduction to Psychology course and were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: a mindfulness condition or a control condition. Participants in the mindfulness condition engaged in a 15-minute mindfulness induction prior to disclosing about a stressful experience, while participants in the control condition listened to a neutrally valenced audio excerpt from a podcast about emotions before speaking about a …

Aesthetics And Performance Evaluation Of Post-Industrial Public Parks, Adel C. Vaughn

Landscape Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Post-Industrial sites are often un-utilized and deserted places that are an aesthetic, social, ecological, and physical hindrance to the realm of the cities in which they lie, however they possess enormous potential. With respectful and transformative design, these new public parks gain a variety of benefits that extend well beyond the typical benefits exhibited by public parks due to their rich history, fascinating existing structures, high levels of visual and sensorial stimulation, one-of-a-kind traits, and opportunity for impactful change. By evaluating these post-industrial public parks, knowledge can be gained about what specific elements in the landscape contribute to their overall …