ArticleBehavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology
Once an optimist, always an optimist? Studying cognitive judgment bias in mice.
Article in Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 22 citations in OpenAlex.
- Judgment Bias Responses in Domestic Dog Puppies at 60 Days of Age.Veterinary sciences · 2026Article
- Effects of enrichment removal on cognitive judgement bias of mice: a comparison of two paradigms.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2026Article
- Balancing consistency and flexibility: exploring trait and state optimism in rats using the cognitive judgement bias test.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2026Article
- The influence of regularly changing enrichment on the cognitive judgement bias of laboratory rats.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Optimism and pessimism: a concept for behavioural ecology.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Pharmacological agents and injection stress, but not social isolation, alter cognitive judgement bias in the mouse touchscreen operant chamber.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Optimistic and pessimistic cognitive judgement bias modulates the stress response and cancer progression in zebrafish.Translational psychiatry · 2025Article
- Article
- Are lateralized and bold fish optimistic or pessimistic?Animal cognition · 2024Article
- The power of a touch: Regular touchscreen training but not its termination affects hormones and behavior in mice.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- Cognitive bias in animal behavior science: a philosophical perspective.Animal cognition · 2022Article
- Development of an IntelliCage-based cognitive bias test for mice.Open research Europe · 2022Article
- Transcriptional profiles in the mouse amygdala after a cognitive judgment bias test largely depend on the genotype.Frontiers in molecular neuroscience · 2022Article
- Once an optimist, always an optimist? Studying cognitive judgment bias in mice.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Individuals differ in the way they judge ambiguous information: some individuals interpret ambiguous information in a more optimistic, and others in a more pessimistic way. Over the past two decades, such "optimistic" and "pessimistic" cognitive judgment biases (CJBs) have been utilized in animal welfare science as indicators of animals' emotional states. However, empirical studies on their ecological and evolutionary relevance are still lacking. We, therefore, aimed at transferring the concept of "optimism" and "pessimism" to behavioral ecology and investigated the role of genetic and environmental factors in modulating CJB in mice. In addition, we assessed the temporal stability of individual differences in CJB. We show that the chosen genotypes (C57BL/6J and B6D2F1N) and environments ("scarce" and "complex") did not have a statistically significant influence on the responses in the CJB test. By contrast, they influenced anxiety-like behavior with C57BL/6J mice and mice from the "complex" environment displaying less anxiety-like behavior than B6D2F1N mice and mice from the "scarce" environment. As the selected genotypes and environments did not explain the existing differences in CJB, future studies might investigate the impact of other genotypes and environmental conditions on CJB, and additionally, elucidate the role of other potential causes like endocrine profiles and epigenetic modifications. Furthermore, we show that individual differences in CJB were repeatable over a period of seven weeks, suggesting that CJB represents a temporally stable trait in laboratory mice. Therefore, we encourage the further study of CJB within an animal personality framework.
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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.