Animal Behaviour and Cognition : Report
Added on 2020-01-23
11 Pages3557 Words101 Views
WHAT CAN STUDIES OF ANIMAL BEHAVIORAND COGNITION TELL US ABOUT THEEXISTENCE AND NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESSIN NON-HUMAN ANIMALS?
TABLE OF CONTENTSINTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1Main Body.......................................................................................................................................1CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................4REFERENCES................................................................................................................................5
INTRODUCTIONAnimal science is a leading concept which is developing high and significant interest inthe discipline. Cognitive scientists and biologists are working to understand how the minds andbrains of animals work, how they evolved, and what they can tell us about the human mind andbrain. High interest to analyse animal behaviour and emotions is now developing within peoplein order to create deep understanding of animal behaviour (McCall and Singer, 2012). Thepresent study will evaluate and understand the cognitive components of emotions for animals. Inthe report an attempt is made to identify the aspects of research subject that yet not exploreddeeply in science to obtain better result (Broom and Fraser, 2015). In addition to this, criticalevaluation of behavioral theories will be done in the report. In this way entire research work willbe carried out. MAIN BODYBehavioral measures of emotionHuman experiences various emotional situations and emotions which demonstratescognitive affecting biases that are also termed as cognitive bias. For instance, in human, it isoften seen that they tends to make negative decisions and judgments towards a given situation orstimuli when they are in a negative state. Similarly, in various studies, it has been evidenced thatanimals have distinctive emotional feelings which show contrast bias in relation to thejudgmental decisions. Identifying conscious emotional experiences in human is a subjectiveaspect, but it is inaccessible to measure the emotional state of non-human animals. Hence,measuring physiological and behavioral changes are only the way to monitor emotional state ofanimal. The deep understanding of emotions of animals is important to comprehend their mentaland psychological aspect. As per the analysis the behavioural aspects of subjective experiencescan be analysed through language emotions. According to Virga (2005), stimuli, situation, eventsplays an important role in measuring emotional valence of the animals and its influence over thecognitive functioning comprising attentional and judgmental bias.The researches and factsreveals that behavioural, psychological and cognitive components of emotions are crucial andthey acts as an important determinants in animal’s behaviour ((Mendl and et.al., 2009). Differentmeasures and approaches have been developed to monitor and measure the behavioural and1| P a g e
psychological aspects of emotions in an animal. The likes, dislikes, pain, behaviour and sadness,happiness etc. play a decisive role in determining behaviour of animals. However cognitivecomponent of emotion is widely unexplored segment of the subject (Gutnik and et.al., 2006).Different stimuli has been analysed which affect the human cognitive emotions which affecttheir judgement, memories and biases. Judgement bias is observed in case of animals as in the research conducted it is identifiedthat judgement bias may come in existence in case emotions have impact on decision making ofanimals. In the research of Mendl (2009), it is identified that it is difficult to directly measureanimal’s conscious emotions therefore, physiological and behavioural components helps todetermine emotional valence of the animals. In this, cognitive function such as informationprocessing is considered as an indicator for the animal’s emotion, more importantly, valencewhich state that people in negative state tends to retrieve negative memories & create negativedecisions also. The researcher has applied judgemental bias paradigm wherein animals have beentrained and in this, one cue presented positive feelings and another one with negative emotionalstate. Both of the cues have been presented with ambiguous cues and hypothesized that group ofanimal with negative state are more likely to respond the stimuli when they have pessimisticresponse. The findings stated that treatment brought change in the learning, motivation andgeneral activities. Although the research had studied rats, dogs, monkeys, starlings and human inhypothesis testing, still, the sample selected was too small which is the main limitation.Moreover, it is possible that different species might shown different yields in the treatmentperformed results in confounding interpretation which limits the outcome of the study. Self-directed behaviour is observed in case of animals as it can be observed thatsometimes they injured themselves. There is geographic boundary within which animals live andif anyone crosses that boundary fight comes in existence among animals. The study presented byVint (2005), it is mentioned that behavioural aspects are the indicators of diseases in animal suchas anxiety, night walking, irritability, aggression, anxiety and others. The research on dogsinvestigated higher prolactin levels with high anxiety and chronic stress related with stereotypic& displacement behaviour, in contrast low level of prolactin indicates fear & phobias. Self-directed behaviour is regarded as the behaviour how animal directs their efforts towardsthemselves repeatedly in the absence of medical treatment. It indulges a lot of changes from2| P a g e
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