Cognition and Animal Welfare
There are important links between animal cognition and animal welfare. Poor welfare can result in anxiety and chronic stress, which are known to affect aspects of cognition including attention, memory and decision-making.
Melissa Bateson’s group are currently pioneering novel approaches to assessing emotions in captive animals by measuring how emotional states such as anxiety affect decision-making. They have recently shown that starlings housed in cages without environmental enrichment may be more pessimistic in their interpretation of ambiguous stimuli using both an operant task and a more naturalistic foraging task.
For many people, the subjective feelings of animals are of paramount importance, but measuring affective state in animals presents researchers with significant challenges. Paul Flecknell and Melissa Bateson are currently collaborating to develop cognitive approaches to assessing pain in laboratory rodents.
