ANIMAL WELFARE (Cognition and Learning) Flashcards
Cognition:
-broadly defined, refers to the mechanism by which animals acquire, process, store and act on information from the environment
Animal cognition:
-describes the mental capacities of non-human animals and the study of those capacities
Common husbandry practices:
-require considerable physiological and behavioural adaptation by the animal
-failure to adjust to environmental conditions represents a welfare problem
Provide adequate welfare:
-necessary to UNDERSTAND not only their behavioural but also their cognitive needs and capacities
Cognitive research:
-has the potential to highlight mismatches between current husbandry practices and adaptive abilities of livestock
>adaptation to new facilities, feed bunks, pen mates)
Cognitive domains:
-physical cognition
-social cognition
Physical cognition:
-an organism’s understanding of objects and their various spatial and causal relationships
Social cognition:
-discrimination and recall of conspecifics
>individual or group level
-ability to infer the motivations and desires of others
Physical cognition traits: examples
-categorization
-numerical ability
-object permanence
-reasoning/inferences
-tool use
Categorization:
-ability to group items based on common features
Implications: predictability of potential novel stressors (food acquisition, handling)
Numerical ability:
-discrimination and judgement of distinct quantities
Implications: perceived predictability of environment (group number) and adaptation to stressors (group cohesion)
Object permanence:
-notion that objects continue to exist when they move out of the visual field
Implications: perceived predictability of environment (housing)
Reason/inferences:
-establishment of an association between a visible and an imagined event
Implications: perceived predictability of environment (housing)
>complexity of cognitive enrichment
Tool use:
-manipulation of objects to reach a goal
Implications: complexity of cognitive enrichment
Social cognition traits:
-discrimination and recognition of conspecifics
-discrimination and recognition of humans
-communication with humans
-social learning
-prosocial behaviour
-fairness
Visual attention and parasite burden in sheep:
-parasite infection/immune status appears to have a detrimental effect on visual attention, learning and memory
Learning:
-change in behaviour resulted from information from OUTSIDE the brain
Ivan Pavlov:
-nobel prize in physiology and medicine
-tests on dogs: salivation, getting food, signal before getting food
Classical conditioning:
-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
Predisposition to learn:
-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
Predisposition to learn examples:
-taste: associated better with nausea
-sound: associated better with shock
Operant conditioning:
-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
Operant condition: training
-either rewards or punishments immediately following the behaviour to acquire or to extinct
Positive vs. negative reinforcement:
-positive: happy to get something nice
-negative: relieved to have escaped something nasty (less ‘whips’)
Positive vs. negative punishment:
-negative: lost something he likes
-positive: upset to have received something nasty
Non-associative learning (one-event) learning
-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
Habituation (extinction):
-the waning of a response to a repeated stimulus
Ex. train always coming back
Sensitization:
-repeated presentation of a stimulus lowers the threshold for the elicitation of a response
Ex. dog and fireworks
Animal intelligence:
-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
Hebb-Willams closed field test:
-various different walls (‘maze’)
-smartest domestic animal was a dog
-next were cows, goats, and pigs
Motivation:
-strength of the tendency to perform a given behaviour, taking into account internal and external factors
Motivational state of an animal:
-combination of the level of all causal factors
>genes
>physiology
>experience/learning/memory
Motivational control systems:
-feedback control
-feedforward control
Feedback control:
-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
Feedforward control:
-a change in state is predicted
-corrective action taken before it can occur so that the state changes little from its former condition
Previous unpleasant experiences:
-often result in expectation
Ex. knows when the sun goes down, it’ll get cold, so they move to shelter
Measuring motivation: operant conditioning:
-once animals have learned to perform an operant task to obtain access to a resource, the ‘work’ required for each access can be increased
Would cows work more to access feed after 1.5h of fasting or to access pasture after eating?
-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)
Moral behaviours:
- Reciprocity
- Empathy
chips (moral behaviours)
-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)
