Abstract
The cognitive bias model of animal welfare assessment is informed by studies with humans demonstrating that the interaction between emotion and cognition can be detected using laboratory tasks. A limitation of cognitive bias tasks is the amount of training required by animals prior to testing. A potential solution is to use biologically relevant stimuli that trigger innate emotional responses. Here; we develop a new method to assess emotion in rhesus macaques; informed by paradigms used with humans: emotional Stroop; visual cueing and; in particular; response slowing. In humans; performance on a simple cognitive task can become impaired when emotional distractor content is displayed. Importantly; responses become slower in anxious individuals in the presence of mild threat; a pattern not seen in non-anxious individuals; who are able to effectively process and disengage from the distractor. Here; we present a proof-of-concept study; demonstrating that rhesus macaques show slowing of responses in a simple touch-screen task when emotional content is introduced; but only when they had recently experienced a presumably stressful veterinary inspection. Our results indicate the presence of a subtle “cognitive freeze” response; the measurement of which may provide a means of identifying negative shifts in emotion in animals.
Highlights
In the last decade, there has been a notable increase in the number of studies adapting principles and methods from human cognitive psychology in order to assess animal welfare [1,2]
The weight of evidence from the judgement bias task supports the view that animals become more pessimistic about ambiguous information in the environment when they have undergone a negative mood manipulation or pharmacological treatment [2,3,4]
Two additional lines of evidence indicate the value of further developing such tasks for assessing animal emotion. These include animal data on bodily freezing and attentional orienting to threat [16,17,18,19] and human work on a subtle cognitive form of the freeze response to threatening stimuli presented during laboratory tasks [17,20,21,22,23]. Based on these converging lines of evidence, we propose a novel approach to measure a subtle cognitive form of the freeze response to mild threat in animals, based on methods widely used with humans in the laboratory [12,20,24]
Summary
There has been a notable increase in the number of studies adapting principles and methods from human cognitive psychology in order to assess animal welfare [1,2]. The most widely used of these in recent times is the “judgement bias” task [1]. In this type of task, animals must learn to discriminate abstract cues that signal reward and non-reward, before being tested on whether they make optimistic or pessimistic judgements about new abstract cues that have properties intermediate to the two learned cues. 1678–2666 trials in one study with rhesus macaques: [5]), potentially disruptive to the animals involved, lead to attrition of study subject numbers, and be costly in terms of time and money for researchers [4].
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