A spatial judgement task to determine background emotional state in laboratory rats, Rattus norvegicus

By Oliver Burman, Richard M. A. Parker, Elizabeth S. Paul, M. Mendl. 2008

177 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Humans experiencing different background emotional states display contrasting cognitive (e.g. judgement) biases when responding to ambiguous stimuli. We have proposed that such biases may be used as indicators of animal emotional state. Here, we used a spatial judgement task, in which animals were trained to expect food in one location and not another, to determine whether rats in relatively positive or negative emotional states respond differently to ambiguous stimuli of intermediate spatial location. We housed 24 rats with environmental enrichment for 7 weeks. We removed the enrichment from half the animals prior to the start of training to induce a relatively negative emotional state, whereas we left it in place for the remaining rats. After 6 training days, the rats successfully discriminated between the rewarded and the unrewarded locations in terms of an increased latency to arrive at the unrewarded location, with no housing treatment difference. The subjects then underwent 3 days of testing in which three ambiguous ‘probe’ locations, intermediate between the rewarded and the unrewarded locations, were introduced. There was no difference between the treatments in the rats' judgement of two of the three probe locations, the exception being when the ambiguous probe was positioned closest to the unrewarded location. This result suggests that rats housed without enrichment, and in an assumed relatively negative emotional state, respond differently to an ambiguous stimulus compared to rats housed with enrichment, providing evidence that cognitive biases may be used to assess animal emotional state in a spatial judgement task.

Subfields: Sensory Systems, Small Animals, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/78478e4c8f23ef3978ab3b5d75b3102de89f5c96

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In Sensory Systems

In Small Animals

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Cognitive bias in a non-human primate: husbandry procedures influence cognitive indicators of psychological well-being in captive rhesus macaques (2012, background): “…particularly pertinent given the 437 evidence for an influence of affect on processes such asttention and memory formation 438 (Mendl, 1999), state-dependent-learning and reward sensitivity (van der Harst et al 2003; 439 Pompilio et al 2006; Burman et al 2008b; Woike et al 2009; Mendl et al 2009).”
An integrative and functional framework for the study of animal emotion and mood (2010, background): “Recent studies of species including rats (Harding et al. 2004; Burman et al. 2008, 2009; Enkel et al. 2010), sheep (Doyle et al. 2010), starlings (Bateson & Matheson 2007; Matheson et al. 2008), rhesus monkeys and dogs (see Mendl et al. 2009 for a review) have found evidence in support of these…”
Cognitive ability and awareness in domestic animals and decisions about obligations to animals (2010, background): “Similarly, Burman et al. (2008) found hat rats from a better environment treated an ambiguous ood bowl position as positive.”
A review of behavioural methods to study emotion and mood in pigs, Sus scrofa (2014, background): “Early research in this area was carried out with ats (Burman et al., 2008; Harding et al., 2004) and starlings Bateson and Matheson, 2007; Matheson et al.”
Environmental enrichment induces optimistic cognitive bias in rats (2011, background): “Our results therefore add to previous work in starlings and rats showing that animals in unenriched housing typically exhibit more pessimistic cognitive biases (Bateson & Matheson 2007; Burman et al. 2008a).”
Release from restraint generates a positive judgement bias in sheep (2010, methodology): “In contrast to the current study, these longer term stressors involved subjecting the animals to different housing situations of enriched versus unenriched (Bateson and Matheson, 2007; Burman et al., 2008; Matheson et al., 2008), or unpredictable versus predictable conditions (Harding et al., 2004).”