Chapter 16 - Finding food is fun! Location discrimination training

Abstract

Food is a biological necessity for all living organisms, and animals will invest tremendous effort searching for it. In this exercise, we will explore how an animal's foraging decisions are affected by their recent learning experiences and cognitive biases. Students will use operant conditioning to train an animal to discriminate between two food dish locations. In one location the dish has food and approaching it will be positively reinforced. In a second location the dish is empty; approaches to this dish are not reinforced and will thus be extinguished. After learning to discriminate between the two locations, you will observe if and how quickly the animal will approach a dish placed in a novel location. Judgment bias is defined as a systematic error in cognition that affects how an individual responds to an ambiguous stimulus. In this experiment, an animal's response to the food dish in a novel location can be used as a measure of judgment bias.