Cognition and Sentience

• Cognition: All ways in which animals take in information about the world through the senses, process, retain and decide to act on it.
• Sentience: Sentience refers to the ability to have positive and negative experiences caused by external affectations to our body or to sensations within our body.
• Consciousness: To be conscious is to be able to have some kind of subjective experience or awareness of something.
• If we say an individual is conscious/sentient, then we mean that there is something which it is like to be that individual or, more simply, that individual can have experiences.
• Assessing the experiences (positive or negative) of other species is central to our ethical concern for animals and legislation is often based on this idea, but understanding the felt experiences of others is extremely challenging. They are internal and not directly observable.
• Emotions have three biological components: behavioural, physiological, and experience. Only two can be observed.
• Emotions evolved as reinforcers to motivate behaviours to achieve goals. Positive emotions help to acquire rewards (e.g. food). Negative emotions help to avoid punishments (e.g. pain).
• The pleasant/unpleasant experience adds importance; behavioural responses that outcompete others for immediate priority. Emotions give flexibility and complexity to behavioural responses.