Program

Program Animal Cognition 09.02.2026 – 10.02.2026 

List of Abstracts

Colin Allen

Title: Signatures, Markers, and Tests: new observations without new theories?

Short Description: The comparative study of cognition and consciousness is in a pre-paradigmatic phase, lacking consensus about theories and methodology. Nevertheless, there is broad (but by no means universal) acceptance of the idea that there is significant continuity between human and animal cognition and consciousness. Furthermore, rapid advances in generative AI have fueled interest in tests of cognition and consciousness. While experimental tests of such constructs as “mindreading” and “self awareness” have been applied comparatively, success in any of these tests basically yields no further predictions about the animals (or AI systems) that pass them. The lack of consensus about theories is partly driven by the very weak predictions made by the different theories that have been proposed.
How should science proceed in such a theoretical vacuum?

 

 

 Kristin Andrews

Title: Investigating shared norms between humans and animals

Short description: In many parts of the world, humans and animals share territories and engage in frequent interactions. Street dogs in cities, elephants in tea plantations, and tigers passing through local villages sometimes lead to interspecies conflicts. I will discuss the conceptualization of these cases as shared social norms in multi-species societies, and describe the launch of our research project on studying shared norms between dogs and humans.

 Jonathan Birch

Title: Five windows into how animals experience time

Short Description: How can we investigate non-human experiences scientifically? Here, we propose a way of gaining empirical traction on one important universal feature of experience: its temporal structure or “timescape”. Perceptual contents follow systematic principles regarding how they are synchronised, revised, and their duration of persistence. Similarly, perceptual contents are also sampled over attentional windows and switch after regular dwell times while viewing bistable images. These principles can be explored through classical temporal illusions and other experimental paradigms. We analyse literature from distinct animal species studied under such paradigms to highlight their varying timescapes. We propose a way to conceptualize an animal’s timescape in terms of five key windows, all of which can be studied experimentally. Our aim is to lay the conceptual foundations for a research program that compares and contrasts the temporal Umwelts of non-human animals.

Stefano Carlini

Title: Aesthetic Attention in Bowerbirds: Toward an Empirically Testable Hypothesis

Short Description: Does aesthetic behaviour occur in non-human species? Focusing on female bowerbirds, this talk argues that their mate choice may involve a form of aesthetic attention rather than mere signal decoding or hedonic response. I define aesthetic attention as a perceptual stance involving a feedback loop between pleasure and attention, an interaction between motivational states and signal features, and a partial decoupling from immediate pragmatic aims. By grounding this concept in testable mechanisms, the talk aims to shift bowerbirds’ aesthetic behaviour from speculative analogy to empirical research.

 

 

Tomer Czaczkes

Title: Advanced cognition with hard limits in an insect

Short Description: A growing body of evidence ascribes surprisingly advanced cognitive abilities to insects. For example, ants seem to have a surprisingly advanced grasp of the affordance of the physical world around them. However, describing the surprising limits to cognition – what simply cannot be learned, and how animals nonetheless solve problems which are beyond their cognitive abilities, may be under-emphasised in animal cognition research.

 

 

 Rebecca Dreier

Title: Episodic Memory and Consciousness: Why They Come Together in Animals

Short Description: In this paper, I argue that episodic memory is likely to be conscious in any animal by considering episodic memory’s close entanglement with conscious processes. Theories of consciousness, like the Perceptual Reality Monitoring Theory (Lau 2022) or the Global Workspace Theory (Baars, 1995; Dehaene & Naccache, 2001; Shea & Frith, 2019), argue that specific processes are responsible for conscious experience. I show that episodic memory, defined by its constructive process and a basic mnemonic function, is deeply connected to those processes and therefore likely to be conscious. Thus, for any animal with such a capacity, it is likely that they have phenomenally conscious episodic memory, instead of merely episodic-like memory.

 Leonard Dung

Title: Reconciling human and non-human consciousness research: Metamodels and instantiation models of consciousness

Short description: In this talk, I argue for five claims. First, there is a tension between evidence based on neuroscience studies on mammals which suggests that consciousness requires the neocortex and evidence – based on behavioral studies on non-mammals – suggesting that a wide range of non-mammals including fish and many invertebrate species are conscious. Second, all other things being equal, it is better to resolve this tension by developing an account which can accept both kinds of evidence as valid. Third, some appealing strategies, including two-level theories of consciousness, fail to resolve this tension. Fourth, we can best resolve this tension and fruitfully connect mammalian and non-mammalian consciousness studies by developing metamodels and instantiation models of consciousness which mutually constrain and inform each other. On this view, metamodels capture abstract similarities between the neural bases of consciousness in all species and instantiation models provide detailed, species-specific mechanistic explanations of consciousness. Fifth, the relation between the unlimited associative learning architecture and the global neuronal workspace theory is a successful example of the distinction of and fruitful interaction between metamodels and instantiation models, exemplifying the virtues of this general methodological approach.

 Onur Güntürkün

Title: Know Yourself! – The Many Open Questions of Mirror Self Recognition

Short description: Mirror use for self-inspection is often considered a cognitive hallmark that has been hailed as an experimental indicator of self-recognition or self-awareness. While the experimental procedure involves many steps, positive evidence requires that the animal reaches for a novel mark on its body that it cannot see without a mirror. This test has been meanwhile applied in many vertebrate and invertebrate species. The result pattern represents a conundrum of partly contradictory findings and vastly differing interpretations. My aim is to highlight some of the key findings but also problems of this research field. I cannot offer a solution but will suggest to “ecologize” the mark-and-mirror test, to turn it into a component of the natural environment of the tested species.

Albert Newen

Title: Understanding Animals Minds with Multidimensional Profile Theories: Advantages illustrated by investigating Animal Empathy

Short description: How can we develop an adequate scientific understanding of the minds of nonhuman animals? The answer is developed in a sequence of collaborative articles: We propose and defend multi-dimensional profile accounts which are already used for the comparative study of norm cognition and consciousness. This methodology demands that a cognitive capacity is characterized by a set of (basically) independent dimensions where each dimension is connected to operationalizable empirical indicators. Based on the level of realization for each indicator the level of implementation of a dimension is determined for a species, resulting in a multi-dimensional profile for each species. We analyze what this methodology is committed to and illustrate how it works by discussing animal empathy: We argue that we can distinguish five main dimensions of empathy, namely: (1) sensitivity for bodily and affective states of others, (2) perceiving others as individuals in a situation, (3) cognitive perspective taking in relation to the other; in addition, we include as relevant the kind of typically (4) other-oriented response, and (5) the level of flexibility which is connected with the response behavior. This enables us to generate and compare profiles of empathy for several species. We argue that this methodology is a theoretical top-down approach that is fruitfully complementing the bottom-up studies of specific animal abilities.

 Simone Pika
(Talk Cancelled)

Title: Animal minds: From intentionality to prosociality

Short description: Research into the minds of nonhuman animals has focused on physical and social cognitive domains, involving skills such as cooperation, joint attention, tool-use, and intentionality. While it is now widely established that many animal species are able to engage in first-order intentionality (i.e., the actor intends the act/signal to produce a response in the recipient, but does not have beliefs or desires about other mental states (its own or others’), relatively little evidence exists concerning higher-order intentionality and feasible methods are also lacking. In this talk, I will present the existing state of the art and then link recent findings on allo-medicative behaviours in chimpanzees, representing a useful platform to study intentional and prosocial abilities.

 Víctor Carranza Pinedo

Title: Multidimensional Profiles and Borderline Animal Consciousness

Short description: Recent work on animal consciousness recommends a multidimensional ‘profiles’ approach, but discussions often still assume a determinate fact about whether an animal is phenomenally conscious. I argue that if multidimensionality is a claim about the structure of consciousness (and not just our evidence), and if ‘conscious’ supports degrees, then an overall degree must be determined from dimensional scores via some aggregation rule. Given only weak constraints, aggregation is underdetermined, and different admissible rules can diverge for low-but-nontrivial profiles, yielding structurally borderline cases.

 Sanja Srećković

Title: Three dogmas of comparative psychology: dualism, clustering, egoism

Short description: Explanatory efforts in comparative psychology commonly involve deciding between the ‘associative’ and the ‘cognitive’. I point out three underlying assumptions of this practice, which seem accepted by the opposing sides. These are (i) dualism of types of psychological processes; (ii) clustering of the characteristic features of each process type; (iii) economic, egoistic conception of motivation. Although they are not independently justified, these assumptions shape the methodology of comparative psychology and constrain possible interpretations of the results. I show how giving up on these assumptions makes room for new types of explanations of animal behaviors, and I offer a concrete example of how we can better explain some empirical results that have been troublesome within the standard approach.

 Daria Zakharova

Talk title: “Causal Cognition: Beyond Perlian Creatures”.

Short description: The paper argues that reafference – a cognitive mechanism enabling differentiation between self-generated and externally-generated sensory signals – allows non-Pearlian creatures to successfully exploit causal structure of their noisy, complex environment. We argue that this mechanism is at work in human infants and propose that it can be modelled in AI systems to enable a more biologically plausible account of causal learning.