SPECIES AND INDIVIDUAL-DIFFERENCES IN COMMUNICATION BASED ON PRIVATE STATES

The way people come to report private stimulation (e.g., feeling state s) arising within their own bodies is not well understood. Although th e Darwinian assumption of biological continuity has been the basis of extensive animal modeling for many human biological and behavioral phe nomena, few have attempted to model human communication based on priva te stimulation. This target article discusses such an animal model usi ng concepts and methods derived from the study of discriminative stimu lus effects of drugs and recent research on interanimal communication. We discuss how humans acquire the capacity to identify and report pri vate stimulation and we analyze intra- and interspecies differences in neurochemical mechanisms for transducing interoceptive stimuli, enzym atic and other metabolic factors, learning ability, and discrimination learning histories and their relation to psychiatric and developmenta l disabilities.