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Record W4409112303 · doi:10.53765/20512201.32.3.007

Evidence for Sentience in Reptiles

2025· article· en· W4409112303 on OpenAlex
Noam Miller

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Consciousness Studies · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicNeuroendocrine regulation and behavior
Canadian institutionsWilfrid Laurier University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSentiencePsychologyCognitive scienceSocial psychologyCognitive psychologyEnvironmental ethicsPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Though we cannot directly assess consciousness in nonhuman animals, an increasing number of researchers are adopting the marker approach — amassing evidence of behaviours that may indicate consciousness to determine which species are likely to be conscious. Here, I review the evidence for behavioural markers of sentience (also sometimes called phenomenal consciousness) in reptiles, a historically understudied class. Reptiles show some evidence of experiencing pain, stress, and pleasure, demonstrate active sleep and open-ended associative learning, display complex social cognition, and appear capable of self-recognition. However, in all these areas, the behaviours considered key indicators of sentience have often not been tested. There is a need for much more research on all these behaviours and their mechanisms in a wider range of reptile species.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.147
Threshold uncertainty score0.245

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.182
GPT teacher head0.486
Teacher spread0.305 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it