ANIMAL WELFARE (Cognition and Learning)

Question 1

Cognition:

Answer 1

-broadly defined, refers to the mechanism by which animals acquire, process, store and act on information from the environment

Question 2

Animal cognition:

Answer 2

-describes the mental capacities of non-human animals and the study of those capacities

Question 3

Common husbandry practices:

Answer 3

-require considerable physiological and behavioural adaptation by the animal
-failure to adjust to environmental conditions represents a welfare problem

Question 4

Provide adequate welfare:

Answer 4

-necessary to UNDERSTAND not only their behavioural but also their cognitive needs and capacities

Question 5

Cognitive research:

Answer 5

-has the potential to highlight mismatches between current husbandry practices and adaptive abilities of livestock
>adaptation to new facilities, feed bunks, pen mates)

Question 6

Cognitive domains:

Answer 6

-physical cognition
-social cognition

Question 7

Physical cognition:

Answer 7

-an organism’s understanding of objects and their various spatial and causal relationships

Question 8

Social cognition:

Answer 8

-discrimination and recall of conspecifics
>individual or group level
-ability to infer the motivations and desires of others

Question 9

Physical cognition traits: examples

Answer 9

-categorization
-numerical ability
-object permanence
-reasoning/inferences
-tool use

Question 10

Categorization:

Answer 10

-ability to group items based on common features
Implications: predictability of potential novel stressors (food acquisition, handling)

Question 11

Numerical ability:

Answer 11

-discrimination and judgement of distinct quantities
Implications: perceived predictability of environment (group number) and adaptation to stressors (group cohesion)

Question 12

Object permanence:

Answer 12

-notion that objects continue to exist when they move out of the visual field
Implications: perceived predictability of environment (housing)

Question 13

Reason/inferences:

Answer 13

-establishment of an association between a visible and an imagined event
Implications: perceived predictability of environment (housing)
>complexity of cognitive enrichment

Question 14

Tool use:

Answer 14

-manipulation of objects to reach a goal
Implications: complexity of cognitive enrichment

Question 15

Social cognition traits:

Answer 15

-discrimination and recognition of conspecifics
-discrimination and recognition of humans
-communication with humans
-social learning
-prosocial behaviour
-fairness

Question 16

Visual attention and parasite burden in sheep:

Answer 16

-parasite infection/immune status appears to have a detrimental effect on visual attention, learning and memory

Question 17

Learning:

Answer 17

-change in behaviour resulted from information from OUTSIDE the brain

Question 18

Ivan Pavlov:

Answer 18

-nobel prize in physiology and medicine
-tests on dogs: salivation, getting food, signal before getting food

Question 19

Classical conditioning:

Answer 19

-a form of associative learn
-where a stimulus (unconditional stimulus, ex. food) that normally produces an involuntary response (ex. salivating) is paired with an arbitrary stimulus (conditional stimulus, ex. bell) until the conditioned stimulus elicits the same response
* can be reversed

Question 20

Predisposition to learn:

Answer 20

-out of an array of detectable cues, animals are more likely to learn to associate some of them than others with an action or another cue
*following the same training and methodology and time, NOT all stimuli can be equally well associated with a given reinforcer

Question 21

Predisposition to learn examples:

Answer 21

-taste: associated better with nausea
-sound: associated better with shock

Question 22

Operant conditioning:

Answer 22

-form of associative learning
-individual changes the form, intensity or frequency of a behaviour based on the consequences this produce
*voluntary behaviour
-includes superstitious learning

Question 23

Operant condition: training

Answer 23

-either rewards or punishments immediately following the behaviour to acquire or to extinct

Question 24

Positive vs. negative reinforcement:

Answer 24

-positive: happy to get something nice
-negative: relieved to have escaped something nasty (less ‘whips’)

Question 25

Positive vs. negative punishment:

Answer 25

-negative: lost something he likes
-positive: upset to have received something nasty

Question 26

Non-associative learning (one-event) learning

Answer 26

-behaviour toward a specific stimulus changes over time in the absence of any evident link to consequences or other stimuli that would induce such a change
1. Habituation (extinction)
2. Sensitization

Question 27

Habituation (extinction):

Answer 27

-the waning of a response to a repeated stimulus
Ex. train always coming back

Question 28

Sensitization:

Answer 28

-repeated presentation of a stimulus lowers the threshold for the elicitation of a response
Ex. dog and fireworks

Question 29

Animal intelligence:

Answer 29

-a group of skills that enable learning, problem solving and higher-order cognition
-current researchers look at challenges faced by each species, opposed to comparing each organism to humans

Question 30

Hebb-Willams closed field test:

Answer 30

-various different walls (‘maze’)
-smartest domestic animal was a dog
-next were cows, goats, and pigs

Question 31

Motivation:

Answer 31

-strength of the tendency to perform a given behaviour, taking into account internal and external factors

Question 32

Motivational state of an animal:

Answer 32

-combination of the level of all causal factors
>genes
>physiology
>experience/learning/memory

Question 33

Motivational control systems:

Answer 33

-feedback control
-feedforward control

Question 34

Feedback control:

Answer 34

-a displacement from an initial state within the tolerable range occurs
>change is monitored and some corrective action is taken that restores the state to the former condition

Question 35

Feedforward control:

Answer 35

-a change in state is predicted
-corrective action taken before it can occur so that the state changes little from its former condition

Question 36

Previous unpleasant experiences:

Answer 36

-often result in expectation
Ex. knows when the sun goes down, it’ll get cold, so they move to shelter

Question 37

Measuring motivation: operant conditioning:

Answer 37

-once animals have learned to perform an operant task to obtain access to a resource, the ‘work’ required for each access can be increased

Question 38

Would cows work more to access feed after 1.5h of fasting or to access pasture after eating?

Answer 38

-as motivated to access pasture as they are to eat fresh food
-motivation to access pastures was not driven by hunger, rather motivation to be outside
-further research could investigate the nature of this motivation (ex. provide grazing opportunities vs. outdoor access only)

Question 39

Moral behaviours:

Answer 39

1. Reciprocity
2. Empathy

Question 40

chips (moral behaviours)

Answer 40

-chimps cooperate to bring the box with food closer
>when 1 chimp was already fed, didn’t want to help as much, but did because he knew the other chimp needed food and help (knows reciprocity)