Week 6- Learning and cognition

A young sow returns to a location where she found tasty roots the previous day. As she prepares to root, a dominant female approaches. The young sow leaves without feeding and continues along the forest boundary. What questions about the mental processes of the sow’ behaviour can we asl?

• Associative learning: Has the sow learned to associate a location or visual cue with food?

• Spatial cognition: Does she have a mental representation of the area, such as a cognitive map?

• Learning from experience: Does she associate the dominant female with previous competition or aggression?

• Social cognition: Can she anticipate the dominant female’s behaviour or recognize what the other animal may know or intend?

Define cognition

can be defined broadly as the processes through which animals acquire, process, store, and use information from their environment (Shettleworth, 1998).'

Purpose of investing cognition

Studying cognition means investigating how animals process information, not necessarily whether they consciously experience their thoughts.

Cognitive processes include:

• Learning and memory

• Attention and discrimination

• Spatial representation

• Categorization and generalization

• Social information processing

• Decision-making and problem-solving

Why do animals learn?

Learning and cognition can improve an animal’s ability to respond to changing environmental and social conditions.Animals may need to learn about:

• Food: Its location, quality, and availability.

• Predators: Their appearance, location, and behaviour.

• Social relationships: Group members, dominance, and competition.

• Environmental changes: Unpredictable resources and changing conditions.

• Improve survival and reproductive success, contributing to inclusive fitness.

Why do species differ in their cognitive abilities

Because they face different ecological and social challenges.

There isno single measure that adequately captures every aspect of animal intelligence.

Aspects of learning and cognition in domestic animals:

• Associative learning

• Memory and object permanence

• Discrimination, generalization, and categorization

• Social cognition

• Cognition and emotion

• Implications for animal welfare

Pavlov and classical conditioning: research question

Can a neutral stimulus become associated with food and trigger a response?

Pavlov’s experiment: experimental procedure

1. Before conditioning: Food naturally causes dogs to salivate.

2. During conditioning: Pavlov repeatedly presented a bell (or another sound signal) before giving the dogs food.

3. After conditioning: The sound alone elicited salivation, even before food appeared.

Associative learning in Pavlov’s dogs

• Unconditioned stimulus (US): Food

• Unconditioned response (UR): Salivation in response to food

• Conditioned stimulus (CS): Bell previously paired with food

• Conditioned response (CR): Salivation in response to the bell

After repeated pairings, the bell predicts food and triggers an anticipatory response

Operant (instrumental) conditioning

occurs when an animal learns that its behaviour influences the outcome. Allows animals to learn how their actions can obtain rewards or avoid unwanted outcomes.

Example of operant conditioning

A coati and a food-enrichment device

1. The coati initially explores and manipulates a food dispenser.

2. One particular action causes a food pellet to fall.

3. The coati repeats that action because it produces food.

4. Over time, the behaviour becomes more reliable

Classical vs. operant conditioning

• Classical: A stimulus predicts an event.

• Operant: A behaviour influences an outcome.

How are associations formed?

Associative learning depends on the relationship between events and their biological significance:

• Contiguity: Events occurring close together in time can become associated.

• Predictive relationship: Learning depends on how reliably one event predicts another, not simply on repeated pairing.

• Biological significance: Food, illness, and other important outcomes can strongly influence learning.

• Existing associations: Previously learned relationships can affect the acquisition of new associations

Types of reinforcement and punishment

Important distinctions of reinforcement and punishment

• Positive means adding a stimulus

• Negative means removing a stimulus

• Reinforcement increases behaviour

• Punishment decreases behaviour.

Conditioned reinforcers:

Previously neutral stimuli, such as a clicker paired with food, can become reinforcing. However, a clicker does not automatically improve learning or retention in every species or situation.

What 2 ways can learned information be represented

1. Declarative representations - knowing that

2. Procedural representations - knowing how

Declarative representations - knowing that

• Information about objects, events, or relationships.

• Allows information from different experiences to be combined flexibly.

• Example: A chicken uses information about where a particular food is located and its current value to guide its choice.

Procedural representations – knowing how

• Information about how to respond in a particular situation (inflexible).

• Often expressed as learned stimulus–response connections.

• Example: A chicken learns to peck a particular visual target to obtain food.

Why does declarative vs. procedural representation matter

Evidence that animals combine information about events and outcomes suggests that associative learning may involve more complex cognitive processes than simple stimulus–response learning.

Memory involves..

acquiring, storing, and retrieving information. It is closely linked to learning.

What does researchers investigate about memory

• How information is acquired, stored, and retrieved

• How long information is retained

• The capacity of memory

• The neural mechanisms underlying memory

Majory memory systems

• Working memory: Temporarily holds information needed for an ongoing task, such as remembering which food locations have already been visited

• Long-term/reference memory: Retains information over longer periods, such as days, months, or years

• Memory formation involves changes in neural systems, including the hippocampus and amygdala

Purpose of spatial memory in domestic animals

Animals use spatial memory to locate resources and avoid wasting time revisiting unproductive locations.

Examples of spatial memory in domestic animals

• Pigs: Remember food locations for up to 1–2 hours and avoid recently searched locations during foraging.

• Cattle: Remember locations of high-quality food for at least 30 days in some studies.

• Sheep: Remember productive grazing areas in large arenas and use this information to forage efficiently

Cognitive maps

Mental representations of spatial environments that may allow animals to navigate novel routes. Whether domestic species use cognitive maps in particular tasks requires careful experimental testing.

Factors influencing memory

• Biological significance: Information about food, danger, and social relationships can be particularly important.

• Emotion and arousal: Moderate stress-hormone responses may enhance memory consolidation, although intense or prolonged stress can impair memory.

• Consequences of forgetting: People may retain information that is costly to forget more effectively.

• Time and interference: Subsequent experiences may make memories less accessible or disrupt them.

Retroactive interference and example

New information interferes with the retrieval of previously learned information.

e.g., a pig's memory of a food location may be disrupted after it encounters the same arena again without being allowed to search for food

Memory retrieval purpose

Retrieval cues help animals access stored information.

• Context, environmental features, and odours can trigger memory retrieval

Memory retrieval in sheep

• Sheep can learn to discriminate between individual faces and may retain this ability for extended periods.

• Neural responses to familiar sheep faces have been observed after 8–12 months without encountering the individual.

Episodic memory

• Episodic memory in humans involves remembering specific events and their context

• Research suggests that some animals may remember what happened, where it happened, and when it happened. However, whether animals consciously relive past experiences remains unresolved.

• Animal memory is flexible and influenced by experience, biological significance, retrieval cues, and interference.

Object permanence

is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they are no longer visible

Object permanence in human development

• Young infants may not search for an object when it is out of sight.

• Older infants actively search for hidden objects.

• More advanced abilities involve tracking objects that have been moved from one location to another without being seen.

Why does object permanence matter

• Requires animals to retain information about an object that is no longer visible.

• Involves memory, spatial information, and the ability to track objects through occlusion.

Object permanence in animals

• Dogs: Find hidden objects behind screens or inside containers, including in tasks requiring detours.

• Chickens: Retrieve hidden objects even when the objects or containers move out of sight.

• Parrots: Some species can solve more complex tasks involving invisible displacement, in which a hidden object is moved between locations without being seen.

Important considerations in object permanence

• Performance depends on experience with hidden objects.

• Successful retrieval also requires spatial memory and navigation.

• Different tasks test different levels of object permanence; success on a simple task does not necessarily demonstrate more complex understanding.

Discrimination

Learning to distinguish between stimuli and respond differently to them

Examples of discrimination in animals

• Horses may rely more on the position of buckets than their appearance when locating food

• Dogs may learn that barking gets attention in some contexts but not others (TV on vs. TV off).

Generalization

Responding similarly to different stimuli that share relevant features

Balance between discrimination and generalization, and example

The balance between discrimination and generalization depends on the task and its demands.

• A riding-school pony may respond similarly to cues from different riders (generalization)

• An advanced dressage horse needs to distinguish subtle differences between riding cues (avoid generalization)

Categorization

occurs when animals group stimuli based on common features (shared features)

• physical features may include colour, shape, size, or other visual properties

Categorization in horses

Horses can categorize trained and novel images based on whether they have an open centre or are solidly black

Concept information

involves recognizing an abstract idea or class of objects, rather than grouping items only by physical resemblance.

• Evidence for abstract concepts in domestic animals remains limited, partly because designing suitable experiments is challenging

Social learning

An observer acquires information or behaviour by observing a knowledgeable individual (demonstrator).

• Social learning can reduce the time and cost of individual learning.

Key mechanisms of social learning include:

• Stimulus enhancement: Another animal draws attention to a stimulus.

• Imitation: Copying another animal’s actions.

• Emulation: Reproducing the outcome of another animal’s actions (Whiten et al., 2004).

Social learning examples in animals

• Chicks learn about food by observing hens and other chicks. Learning is influenced by food cues and the demonstrator’s social status

• In studies, some pigs and dogs have used information from human or animal partners to locate hidden food, but results vary across species and contexts

Communication in social contexts in animals

Animals communicate information about food, predators, reproductive state, and emotional state.

E.g., Chickens:

• Hens adjust food-related calls and displays depending on food quality and chick behaviour.

• Chickens produce different alarm calls for aerial versus ground predators.

• Alarm calling can depend on the audience and the vulnerability of their chicks

Language involves…

symbolic systems capable of generating new meanings through combinations of symbols and their order

How are cognition and emotion connected?

• Emotional states influence behaviour and physiology, including avoidance, activity, and heart rate.

• Although subjective emotional experiences in animals cannot be directly confirmed, behavioural and physiological responses provide useful indicators.

• Cognitive appraisals—how an animal evaluates an event’s novelty, familiarity, predictability, and suddenness—may influence its emotional response.

• Research in sheep shows that different stimulus characteristics can produce distinct behavioural and physiological responses

Important of connecting cognition and emotion

Welfare relevance: Understanding how animals evaluate events may help us identify conditions associated with positive or negative emotional states.

Cognitive bias

An emotional state influences how an animal interprets ambiguous information

Cognitive bias as an indicator of emotion: In judgement-bias tests, animals learn that:

• Stimulus X predicts a positive outcome, such as more food.

• Stimulus Y predicts a less positive outcome or an aversive event.

• An ambiguous stimulus between X and Y is then presented.

Responses closer to the positive-associated response are interpreted as _____; responses closer to the negative-associated response are interpreted as ______

Responses closer to the positive-associated response are interpreted as optimistic; responses closer to the negative-associated response are interpreted as pessimistic

Why does cognition matter for welfare?

• Recognizing animals’ cognitive abilities challenges the idea that they respond only through simple, fixed behaviours

• Understanding cognition can help explain and prevent welfare problems

• Studying social learning can help develop strategies to reduce the transmission of harmful behaviours

• Cognitive research also helps us understand how animals make choices and whether preference tests reliably reflect their needs.

Choice, self-control and anticipation in animals

• Self-control: Chickens can choose to wait for a larger reward instead of receiving a smaller reward immediately (Abeyesinghe et al., 2005).

• Pigs can learn to prefer locations associated with shorter periods of confinement

• Animals’ ability to anticipate the timing and duration of events may help improve welfare. For example, predictable cues could help animals anticipate when an unpleasant procedure will end.

Welfare implications of choice, self-control and anticipation

Cognitive abilities can support more informed assessments of animal preferences and better management practices

How may an animals’ cognitive abilities influence how they experience welfare challenges

• Memory: Past stressful experiences may continue to affect an animal after the event has ended

• Social cognition and motivation: Animals may be affected by separation from social companions

• Anticipation: Animals may respond to expected future events, including potentially stressful procedures