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Self-awareness as a product of
behavioral history. Santiago Benjumea and Andrés M. Pérez-Acosta Universidad de Sevilla and Universidad Catolica de Colombia, Spain and Colombia Consciousness is today a subject with renewed impact in the behavioral sciences. A type of consciousness that has been extensively studied is knowledge of self or self-awareness. In our Laboratory of Animal Behavior, we are carrying out a research line on this issue, particularly on conditional discrimination of animal's own behavior. Our first relevant finding in our subjects (pigeons) is the emergence of symmetry between the pigeon's own behavior and arbitrary stimuli. Currently, we are trying to demonstrate the positive transfer of conditional self-discrimination to new contingencies. The main implication of our findings is a new concept of self-awareness as a basic process product of behavioral history, but not a complex psychological process derived itself from more basic processes. Keywords: self-awareness, conditional discrimination, behavioral history, pigeons |
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