Year: 2026
Grant: £648
Francesca Johansen
Teagasc, Ireland
Developing measures for animal emotion is key for animal welfare promotion and improvement. Cognitive bias tests, such as the judgement bias task, can indicate the effects of emotional states upon cognitive processes, and can be used to support existing measures of animal welfare. These cognitive bias methods are increasingly being used by the scientific community to further understand the welfare impacts of various factors, such as housing conditions, behavioural opportunities, or the human-animal relationship. The increase in using these methods suggests that many impactful changes to animal welfare in the coming years, will be based on results from these tests.
To ensure that any potential changes are truly representative of welfare improvements, from the animals’ perspective, it is essential to understand elements which may confound these results. Characteristics inherent to the animal, such as personality, have the potential to influence judgement bias outcomes. For example, a more ‘optimistic’ response to a novel ambiguous cue could also be because of high ‘boldness’ in an individual.
This project aims to investigate if judgement bias task outcomes are influenced by personality traits in pigs. To achieve this, pigs will be judgement bias tested in settings where the ambiguous cue will be either novel or non-novel. The results will contribute to our understanding of judgement bias task outcomes and their potential confounds.