People learn many things by being told a set of rules and/or objectives. Over time they can self-evaluate their performance against those rules and objective.

I suppose an animal may have a need - it feel hungry. If it can satisfy that need then it should reinforce whatever it did to get not-hungry. I suppose that doesn't require conscious awareness. But at some level of complexity we have to be able to plan more complex actions (hunting, tracking) and be able to self-evaluate performance on the sub-tasks used to get food.