ArticlePloS one2015
Effects of Degree and Timing of Social Housing on Reversal Learning and Response to Novel Objects in Dairy Calves.
Article in PloS one, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Welfare implications on management strategies for rearing dairy calves: A systematic review. Part 2 - Social management.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2023Pooled it
- Effect of horse sleep behavior on performance in a field-side spatial reversal learning test.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Effect of dairy calf rearing systems on affective states.Discover animals · 2026Review
- Cognition of dairy cattle: Implications for animal welfare and dairy science.JDS communications · 2025Review
- Does the Post-Natal Social Environment Influence Cognitive Development in a Social Gecko?Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Measuring minds: Understanding the mental states of dairy cattle in different management conditions.JDS communications · 2025Article
- Effects of reward type and previous social experience on cognitive testing outcomes of weaned dairy calves.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Effects of access to a well-resourced environment on dairy calf cognition and affective state.PloS one · 2025Article
- Mitigating the Effects of Maternal Loss on Harbour Seal Pups in Captive Care.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Effects of social housing on dairy calf response to novelty shortly after weaning and grouping.JDS communications · 2024Article
- Current research considering social behavior to improve the welfare of commercially raised dairy calves.JDS communications · 2024Article
- Effects of thermal stress on calf welfare.JDS communications · 2024Article
- Long-Term Effects of Pre-Weaning Individual or Pair Housing of Dairy Heifer Calves on Subsequent Growth and Feed Efficiency.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Animal affect, welfare and the Bayesian brain.Animal welfare (South Mimms, England) · 2024Review
- Early-life contact with non-maternal adult cows and a pasture-based rearing environment influence behavioural responses of dairy heifers to novelty.Animal welfare (South Mimms, England) · 2024Article
- Social housing improves dairy calves' performance in a competition test.JDS communications · 2023Article
- Social contact from birth influences personality traits of group-housed dairy calves.JDS communications · 2023Article
- Contact with Mature Cows and Access to Pasture during Early Life Shape Dairy Heifer Behaviour at Integration into the Milking Herd.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Welfare of calves.EFSA journal. European Food Safety Authority · 2023Article
- Fear of the new? Geckos hesitate to attack novel prey, feed near objects and enter a novel space.Animal cognition · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Rodents and primates deprived of early social contact exhibit deficits in learning and behavioural flexibility. They often also exhibit apparent signs of elevated anxiety, although the relationship between these effects has not been studied. To investigate whether dairy calves are similarly affected, we first compared calves housed in standard individual pens (n = 7) to those housed in a dynamic group with access to their mothers (n = 8). All calves learned to approach the correct stimulus in a visual discrimination task. Only one individually housed calf was able to re-learn the task when the stimuli were reversed, compared to all but one calf from the group. A second experiment investigated whether this effect might be explained by anxiety in individually housed animals interfering with their learning, and tested varying degrees of social contact in addition to the complex group: pair housing beginning early (approximately 6 days old) and late (6 weeks old). Again, fewer individually reared calves learned the reversal task (2 of 10 or 20%) compared to early paired and grouped calves (16 of 21 or 76% of calves). Late paired calves had intermediate success. Individually housed calves were slower to touch novel objects, but the magnitude of the fear response did not correlate with reversal performance. We conclude that individually housed calves have learning deficits, but these deficits were not likely associated with increased anxiety.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.