Cognitive Bias in Animal Behavior Science: a Philosophical Perspective

Overview

Journal Anim Cogn

Publisher Springer

Specialty Veterinary Medicine

Date 2022 Jul 5

PMID 35781584

Authors

Behzad Nematipour

Marko Bracic

Ulrich Krohs

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Emotional states of animals influence their cognitive processes as well as their behavior. Assessing emotional states is important for animal welfare science as well as for many fields of neuroscience, behavior science, and biomedicine. This can be done in different ways, e.g. through assessing animals' physiological states or interpreting their behaviors. This paper focuses on the so-called cognitive judgment bias test, which has gained special attention in the last 2 decades and has become a highly important tool for measuring emotional states in non-human animals. However, less attention has been given to the epistemology of the cognitive judgment bias test and to disentangling the relevance of different steps in the underlying cognitive mechanisms. This paper sheds some light on both the epistemology of the methods and the architecture of the underlying cognitive abilities of the tested animals. Based on this reconstruction, we propose a scheme for classifying and assessing different cognitive abilities involved in cognitive judgment bias tests.

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