Cabral-Calderin, Hechavarria, and Melloni’s Neuroethological Approach

Neuroscientists Yuranny Cabral-Calderin, Julio Hechavarria, and Lucia Melloni propose a ‘Neuroethological Approach to Consciousness,’ a cross-species, developmental framework that adapts Tinbergen’s classic ‘four questions’ to the scientific study of consciousness. Their approach expands the scope of consciousness research from traditional human-centric, report-dependent methods to a broader comparative strategy that accounts for the ecological, evolutionary, developmental, and neural diversity of conscious phenomena (Cabral-Calderin, Hechavarria, & Melloni, 2025).

The Four Levels of Analysis

The central thesis is that consciousness cannot be properly understood through brain mechanisms alone or by isolating adult humans as the gold standard. Instead, consciousness must be examined in terms of four interrelated explanatory levels:

1. Causation: What neural mechanisms underlie consciousness in a given species or developmental stage?
2. Function: What adaptive purposes does consciousness serve in an organism’s ecological context?
3. Ontogeny: How does consciousness emerge and change across the lifespan?
4. Phylogeny: How has consciousness evolved across the animal kingdom?

This Tinbergen-based framework enables a multidimensional, biologically grounded analysis of both phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness)—the felt, subjective experience—and access consciousness (A-consciousness)—the availability of information for higher cognition and behavior.

In a shift of scientific assumptions, the authors challenge the standard view that only human-like minds are conscious and/or that the characteristics encountered in human-like minds should serve as the gold standard to infer the presence of consciousness in other species. Instead, they argue, the burden of proof should not fall on non-human animals to exhibit adult human traits (like verbal report). Rather, the authors advocate for a more inclusive “continuity hypothesis,” rooted in Darwinian thinking, in which consciousness is seen as a graded property, shaped by evolutionary pressures and manifested differently across taxa.

This shift is particularly crucial in evaluating controversial cases like artificial systems (e.g., LLMs), which may mimic verbal output but lack the biological embodiment and evolutionary history needed to support genuine conscious experience.

From Human-Centric to Comparative Approaches

Cabral-Calderin, Hechavarria, and Melloni propose repurposing mechanistic theories of human consciousness—such as Recurrent Processing Theory (Lamme), Global Neuronal Workspace (Dehaene), Predictive Processing (Friston, Clark), and Attentional Schema Theory (Graziano)—to probe other species and developmental stages. By testing for the presence of similar neural dynamics (e.g., recurrent processing, ignition, feedback loops), one can evaluate consciousness in fetuses, infants, and animals using neuroimaging and perturbation methods in ecologically valid settings.

But the authors caution that neural markers must not be considered in isolation. These mechanisms must be evaluated within their ecological and evolutionary contexts: What behaviors are they supporting? What functions are they enabling (e.g., learning, social bonding, aesthetic appreciation)? And how do these mechanisms vary across development and phylogeny?

Functionally, the authors hypothesize that consciousness is efficacious in evolution: it plays a crucial role in fast environmental assessment, intrinsic value attribution, attention, learning, and even aesthetic preference. Thus, they argue, P-consciousness may contribute to survival through its subjective evaluative power. They emphasize that naturalistic behaviors like play, social bonding, pain avoidance, and self-recognition may offer better evidence of consciousness than highly artificial tasks. Consciousness, they posit, is not a binary trait but a multidimensional one, and different species may exhibit unique “profiles” of consciousness depending on their evolutionary and developmental context.

Profiles and Developmental Trajectories of Consciousness

Using developmental trajectories and cross-species comparison, the authors stress that their neuroethological approach highlights how consciousness unfolds across the lifespan. Evidence from human fetuses and newborns—including early thalamocortical connectivity, spontaneous sensory activity, and cross-modal behaviors—suggests that foundational elements of consciousness arise before birth. This developmental trajectory offers testable markers to explore in other species, reinforcing a comparative, iterative model of research.

The authors argue for nothing less than a reframing of the consciousness question, within which their neuroethological perspective calls for an iterative, comparative strategy—where data from humans can inform animal studies and vice versa—shifting the focus from asking whether a system is conscious to exploring the varieties and modes of consciousness that exist across species. It pushes the field to move beyond anthropocentric and anthropomorphic assumptions and instead to embrace a diversity-of-minds perspective—one that recognizes the legitimacy of nonhuman and nonverbal forms of experience while also acknowledging that specific cognitive capacities, such as introspection, verbal report, or episodic(-like) memory, may shape how consciousness manifests in adult humans without being necessary for consciousness in other species.

At the same time, the authors say that the framework can help to determine whether unifying principles might nevertheless emerge across animal taxa. In doing so, it sets the stage for a biologically grounded, ethically informed science of consciousness—one that acknowledges and respects the multiplicity of conscious forms in nature while systematically investigating how and why consciousness arises in living systems (Cabral-Calderin, Hechavarria, & Melloni, 2025).