Making Decisions under Ambiguity: Judgment Bias Tasks for Assessing Emotional State in Animals.

ABSTRACT: Judgment bias tasks (JBTs) are considered as a family of promising tools in the assessment of emotional states of animals. JBTs provide a cognitive measure of optimism and/or pessimism by recording behavioral responses to ambiguous stimuli. For instance, a negative emotional state is expected to produce a negative or pessimistic judgment of an ambiguous stimulus, whereas a positive emotional state produces a positive or optimistic judgment of the same ambiguous stimulus. Measuring an animal's emotional state or mood is relevant in both animal welfare research and biomedical research. This is reflected in the increasing use of JBTs in both research areas. We discuss the different implementations of JBTs with animals, with a focus on their potential as an accurate measure of emotional state.

SUBMITTER: Roelofs S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4899464 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature