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 […]
Performance on a categorisation task suggests that removal f environmental enrichment induces ‘pessimism’ in captive European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris)
Improving the quality of life of captive animals is dependent on developing valid measures of how animals feel about their lives. It has recently been suggested that biases in information processing may offer a novel means of understanding animal emotions. Anxious and depressed people tend to interpret ambiguous information negatively. We explored the proposal that […]