Autoconciencia animal: Estudios sobre la autodiscriminación condicional en varias especies

Scientific and philosophical community for the most part assume that self-awareness is an ability restricted to human beings and, maybe, great apes. But a series of experimental findings in different species, obtained by several behavioral scientists (ethologists, cognitive psychologists and behavior analysts) lead to the assertion that self-awareness is not exclusively human. Although it seems that these empirical results are incontestable, ¿What do animals show? Psychology has two answers at the present. The first answer tends to explain self-awareness in terms of internal processes or abilities that allow self-knowledge to the individual (self, metamemory, theory of mind, etc.). The second answer emphasizes that self-awareness is a behavioral product, a special form of internal stimulus control: the conditional self-discrimination; some contemporary researchers, radical or methodological behaviorists, have devoted many years to study the conditional self-discrimination; their subjects (of several species) had been able to self-discriminate conditionally in several aspects as the own image, the own internal states (induced by drugs), and the own behavior in different dimensions.