Assessing the potential impact of zoo visitors on the welfare and cognitive performance of Japanese macaques
The influence of visitors on zoo-housed primate behavior and welfare is relatively well-studied but less is known about the possible impact of zoo visitor presence on primates’ cognition. The Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) at Lincoln Park Zoo, USA, participate in voluntary cognitive research sessions in two touchscreen testing booths adjacent to their home enclosure, which […]
A Comparative Perspective on Three Primate Species’ Responses to a Pictorial Emotional Stroop Task
The Stroop effect describes interference in cognitive processing due to competing cognitive demands. Presenting emotionally laden stimuli creates similar Stroop-like effects that result from participants’ attention being drawn to distractor stimuli. Here, we adapted the methods of a pictorial Stroop study for use with chimpanzees (N = 6), gorillas (N = 7), and Japanese macaques […]
The Use of a “Go/Go” Cognitive Bias Task and Response to a Novel Object to Assess the Effect of Housing Enrichment in Sheep (Ovis aries)
It is widely acknowledged that environmental enrichment can improve animals’ welfare and emotional state. This study used cognitive bias and response to a novel object to assess the effect of enriched housing on emotional state in sheep. Eighteen sheep were trained to discriminate between high-quality and low-quality reward locations using a go/go task. Sheep were […]
Assessing and Enhancing the Welfare of Animals with Equivocal and Reliable Cues
The actions of human caretakers strongly influence animals living under human care. Here, we consider how intentional and unintentional signals provided by caretakers can inform our assessment of animals’ well-being as well as help to support it. Our aim is to assist in further developing techniques to learn animals’ affective state from their behavior and […]
Using an Ambiguous Cue Paradigm to Assess Cognitive Bias in Gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) during a Forage Manipulation
In nonhumans, ‘optimism’ is often defined as responding to an ambiguous item in the same manner as to items previously associated with reward (or lack of punishment), and “pessimism” is defined as responding to an ambiguous item in the same manner as to items previously associated with a lack of reward (or with punishment). We […]
Mechanisms underlying cognitive bias in nonhuman primates
Recent research in nonhuman animals highlights the exciting possibility that performance on cognitive bias tasks might indirectly measure an individual’s subjective, affective state. Subjects first learn to perform a conditional discrimination task with two differentially reinforced responses, and then intermediate, unreinforced stimuli are introduced. Differences in affective state have been related to changes in the […]
Gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) Fail to Learn Abstract Cues of Differential Outcomes in a Novel Cognitive Bias Test
In order to assess mood state in three male western lowland gorillas housed in a bachelor group, we developed a novel version of a cognitive bias task. The background color of a touchscreen presented a conditional ‘if, then…” rule relating to outcomes involving differential amounts of food rewards. The gorillas struggled to reach a criterion […]
Cognitive bias as an indicator of animal emotion and welfare: Emerging evidence and underlying mechanisms
Accurate assessment of animal emotion (affect) is an important goal in animal welfare science, and in areas such as neuroscience and psychopharmacology. Direct measures of conscious emotion are not available, so assessment of animal affect has relied onmeasures of the behavioural and physiological components of affective states. These are important indicators but have some limitations […]
Cognitive ability and awareness in domestic animals and decisions about obligations to animals
Observation of behaviour, especially social behaviour, and experimental studies of learning and brain function give us information about the complexity of concepts that animals have. In order to learn to obtain a resource or carry out an action, domestic animals may: relate stimuli such as human words to the reward, perform sequences of actions including […]
Relevance of brain and behavioural lateralization to animal welfare
The left and right sides of the brain are specialised to process information in different ways and to control different categories of behaviour. Research on a range of species has shown that the left hemisphere controls well-established patterns of behaviour performed in non-stressful situations, whereas the right hemisphere responds to unexpected stimuli and controls escape […]