ArticleScientific reports2018
Assessing animal affect: an automated and self-initiated judgement bias task based on natural investigative behaviour.
Article in Scientific reports, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Judgment Bias Responses in Domestic Dog Puppies at 60 Days of Age.Veterinary sciences · 2026Article
- Semantic modelling of animal welfare explained - Part 1: Calculating overall welfare scores for husbandry systems using the ANyWEL model framework.Archives animal breeding · 2026Article
- Measuring minds: Understanding the mental states of dairy cattle in different management conditions.JDS communications · 2025Article
- You are How You Eat: Foraging Behavior as a Potential Novel Marker of Rat Affective State.Affective science · 2024Article
- A primer on the use of computational modelling to investigate affective states, affective disorders and animal welfare in non-human animals.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- Knowledge gaps in psychedelic medicalisation: Preclinical and neuroimaging mechanisms.Neuroscience applied · 2024Review
- Refinement in the European Union: A Systematic Review.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Review
- Sex and age differences in cognitive bias and neural activation in response to cognitive bias testing.Neurobiology of stress · 2022Article
- Developing a feasible and sensitive judgement bias task in dairy cows.Animal cognition · 2022Article
- Judgment Bias During Gestation in Domestic Pigs.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2022Article
- Application of Cognitive Bias Testing in Neuropsychiatric Disorders: A Mini-Review Based on Animal Studies.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Review
- On the road to refinement.Lab animal · 2021Article
- Dissecting the links between reward and loss, decision-making, and self-reported affect using a computational approach.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Reward and punisher experience alter rodent decision-making in a judgement bias task.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Behavioral Methods for Severity Assessment.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2020Review
- Pair housing makes calves more optimistic.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Differential Effects of Serotonin Transporter Genotype on Anxiety-Like Behavior and Cognitive Judgment Bias in Mice.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2019Article
- Measuring affect-related cognitive bias: Do mice in opposite affective states react differently to negative and positive stimuli?PloS one · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Scientific methods for assessing animal affect, especially affective valence (positivity or negativity), allow us to evaluate animal welfare and the effectiveness of 3Rs Refinements designed to improve wellbeing. Judgement bias tasks measure valence; however, task-training may be lengthy and/or require significant time from researchers. Here we develop an automated and self-initiated judgement bias task for rats which capitalises on their natural investigative behaviour. Rats insert their noses into a food trough to start trials. They then hear a tone and learn either to stay for 2 s to receive a food reward or to withdraw promptly to avoid an air-puff. Which contingency applies is signalled by two different tones. Judgement bias is measured by responses to intermediate ambiguous tones. In two experiments we show that rats learn the task in fewer sessions than other automated variants, generalise responses across ambiguous tones as expected, self-initiate 4-5 trials/min, and can be tested repeatedly. Affect manipulations generate main effect trends in the predicted directions, although not localised to ambiguous tones, so further construct validation is required. We also find that tone-reinforcer pairings and reinforcement or non-reinforcement of ambiguous trials can affect responses to ambiguity. This translatable task should facilitate more widespread uptake of judgement bias testing.
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Registered trials
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.