Devaluation as a strategy to address behaviourally whether fish feel

Abstract

Failures of behavioural studies to address the question of whether fish feel pain have left scientists arguing on the basis of other criteria, including anatomy. I draw an analogy with a debate concerning the breadth of stimulus-response learning among nonhuman animals and propose an experiment that harks back to one solution to that debate: the devaluation paradigm. By changing the value of a noxious stimulus after training, one can differentiate a directly evoked response from a response to an intermediate representation, the pain.