Cognitive bias as an indicator of animal emotion and welfare: Emerging evidence and underlying mechanisms
By M. Mendl, Oliver Burman, Richard M. A. Parker, Elizabeth S. Paul. 2009
689 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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 on measures of the behavioural and physiological components of affective states. These are important indicators but have some limitations (e.g. measuring emotional arousal rather than valence (positivity vs negativity)). Human psychology research suggests that changes in cognitive function (information processing) can also be reliable indicators of emotional state (especially valence). For example, people in negative states attend to threats, retrieve negative memories, and make negative judgements about ambiguous stimuli more than happier people. Here we review a new research area investigating the possibility that such affect-induced ‘cognitive biases’ also occur in animals. We focus on a novel ‘judgement bias’ paradigm in which animals are trained that one cue predicts a positive event and another cue predicts a less positive/negative event, and are then presented with ambiguous (intermediate) cues. The hypothesis is that animals in a negative affective state will be more likely to respond to (‘judge’) these ambiguous cues as if they predict the negative event (a ‘pessimistic’ response), than animals in a more positive state. Recent studies of rats, dogs, rhesus monkeys, starlings and humans provide face-value support for this hypothesis. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the affect manipulation treatments used in these studies, and the possibility that treatment-induced changes in feeding motivation, general activity and learning are responsible for the effects observed, and we consider whether the type of bias observed and the precise design of the judgement bias task can provide information about different types of affective state. Judgement biases may result from the influence of affect on decision-making processes including attention to and perception of the ambiguous cue, evaluation of the value and probability (expected utility) of the outcomes of different responses, and action selection. Affect might also modulate general tendencies of loss, risk and ambiguity aversion, hence biasing decisions. We discuss these possibilities in relation to theory and findings from neurobiological and psychological studies of decision-making, in order to better understand the potential mechanisms underlying judgement biases. We conclude with some specific recommendations for study design and interpretation, and suggestions for future research in this area.
Subfields: Genetics, Small Animals, Social Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/782fb2c2b2ce2dd07bb204f79962d02469da837f
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Genetics
In Small Animals
In Social Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- An integrative and functional framework for the study of animal emotion and mood (2010, background): “This information plays an important role in guiding animals’ decisions when appraising new situations or stimuli, especially if there is a degree of ambiguity in their potentially rewarding or punishing consequences (Davidson 1994; Mendl et al. 2009).”
- Assessing equine emotional state (2018, background): “Cognitive bias testing has been used to determine whether animals are in a positive (optimistic) or negative (pessimistic) frame of mind (Mendl et al., 2009), with environmental conditions being found to affect judgement bias in some species, including the rat (Brydges et al.”
- Sheep exhibit a positive judgement bias and stress-induced hyperthermia following shearing (2011, positive): “Judgement biases are thought to reflect the cognitive component of affective state, specifically the valence of affective state (Mendl et al., 2009; Paul et al., 2005).”
- Cognitive ability and awareness in domestic animals and decisions about obligations to animals (2010, methodology): “A narrower definition proposed here is: cognition is having a representation in the brain of an object, event or process in relation to others, where the representation can exist whether or not the object, event or process is directly detectable or actually occurring at the time.”
- Animal play and animal welfare (2011, background): “…advances in the study of animal emotion and affective neurosciences (e.g. Berridge 2003; Dalgleish 2004; Paul et al. 2005; Rolls 2005; Mendl et al. 2010) have therefore not gone unnoticed by animal welfare science (Boissy et al. 2007; Yeates & Main 2008; Mendl et al. 2009; Kalbe & Puppe 2010).”
- Defining and assessing animal pain (2014, positive): “This technique has only been applied to animals relatively recently and involves measuring cognitive or judgement biases in the interpretation of ambiguous information (e.g. Brydges et al., 2011; Douglas et al., 2012; Harding et al., 2004; Mendl, Burman, Parker, & Paul, 2009).”
- Cognitive bias in a non-human primate: husbandry procedures influence cognitive indicators of psychological well-being in captive rhesus macaques (2012, background): “348 349 The data presented here indicate that rhesus macaques demonstrate patterns of emotion-350 mediated cognitive biases comparable to those exhibited by humans and other animals 351 (Eysenck et al 1991, 2006; MacLeod & Byrne 1996; Garner et al 2006; Mendl et al 2009).”
- Release from restraint generates a positive judgement bias in sheep (2010, background): “Specifically, there is evidence suggesting that we may be able to measure emotional valence in animals by investigating underlying biases in the way they interpret information (Harding et al., 2004; Bateson and Matheson, 2007; Burman et al., 2008; Matheson et al., 2008; Mendl et al., 2009).”
- Minds without spines: Evolutionarily inclusive animal ethics (2020, background): “Studies of affect in bees and flies use the same ‘cognitive bias’ paradigm as in studies of emotion in vertebrates (Mendl et al. 2009; more on this in §2.3).”
- Resilience in farm animals: biology, management, breeding and implications for animal welfare (2016, background): “In view of the detrimental impact of negative affective states on cognitive functions (Mendl et al. 2009), measuring the speed of learning to respond to cues associated with rewards (e.”
- The Use of Judgement Bias to Assess Welfare in Farm Livestock (2015, background): “However, some concerns linked to this task have been suggested (Mendl et al 2009).”
- Environmental enrichment induces optimistic cognitive bias in rats (2011, methodology): “A number of researchers have investigated whether environmental manipulations chosen to induce negative affect also produce pessimistic cognitive biases in animals ’ responses to ambiguous stimuli (reviewed in Mendl et al. 2009).”