Abstract
At the start of the new millennium, the “cognitive bias” paradigm emerged as a new approach to assessing animal emotion. In the animal welfare literature, cognitive bias describes how emotions such as anxiety and depression are associated with changes in the way the brain processes information. For example, studies with humans have long demonstrated that anxious people are more vigilant for negative cues and depressed people interpret the proverbial glass of water as “half empty” rather than “half full.” In this chapter, we review how methods developed to study cognitive bias in humans have been adapted to measure the interaction between emotion and cognition in nonhuman primates. We focus on judgment bias and attention bias tasks and discuss study design, controls, confounds, and advantages and limitations of each. We also indicate future research directions. This chapter is intended to introduce readers with little or no experience of cognitive bias tasks to theory and practical considerations around designing these tasks.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the funders of our research: NC3Rs (grant#: NC/L000539/1), European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) primTRAIN program (http://www.cost.eu/COST_Actions/ca/CA15131,COSTSTSMCA15131-36153), Leibniz-Science Campus Primate Cognition (https://www.primate-cognition.eu/en/funding-measures.html), German Research Foundation (https://www.dfg.de/) Research Unit 2591, the Primate Society of Great Britain, and the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare. We thank all of our collaborators, the Caribbean Primate Research Centre, and MRC Harwell Centre for Macaques for supporting our work. We also thank the editors and reviewers for their thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Jaak Panksepp and Corri Waitt.
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Bethell, E.J., Pfefferle, D. (2023). Cognitive Bias Tasks: A New Set of Approaches to Assess Welfare in Nonhuman Primates. In: Robinson, L.M., Weiss, A. (eds) Nonhuman Primate Welfare. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82708-3_9
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