Subjective experiences that can be consciously accessed and reported are associated with the cerebral cortex. Whether sensory consciousness can also arise from differently organized brains that lack a layered cerebral cortex, such as the bird brain, remains unknown. We show that single-neuron responses in the pallial endbrain of crows performing a visual detection task correlate with the birds’ perception about stimulus presence or absence and argue that this is an empirical marker of avian consciousness. Neuronal activity follows a temporal two-stage process in which the first activity component mainly reflects physical stimulus intensity, whereas the later component predicts the crows’ perceptual reports. These results suggest that the neural foundations that allow sensory consciousness arose either before the emergence of mammals or independently in at least the avian lineage and do not necessarily require a cerebral cortex.

可以有意识地获取和报告的主观经验与大脑皮层有关。缺乏知觉意识是否也可以由缺乏分层大脑皮层的不同组织的大脑（如鸟脑）引起。我们表明执行视觉检测任务的乌鸦的睑板端脑中的单个神经元反应与鸟类对刺激存在或不存在的感知有关，并认为这是鸟类意识的经验标记。神经元活动遵循一个时间性的两阶段过程，其中第一个活动成分主要反映物理刺激强度，而第二个成分预测乌鸦的知觉报告。