How Studying Interactions Between Animal Emotions, Cognition, and Personality Can Contribute to Improve Farm - Genetics and the Behavior of Domestic Animals - page 100

Cognitive Enrichment: A New Approach Based on
the Animals' Appraisal Abilities
The conceptual framework that has been developed from recent advances
in cognitive psychology and that is reported above (see the section,
Contribution of Cognitive Psychology to Access Animal Emotions) is particu-
larly useful to scientifically explore positive feelings in animals and to
develop strategies in animal husbandry for enhancing positive emotional
experiences. We outline three specific cognitive processes for eliciting posi-
tive experiences: signaling a reward in advance, giving a higher reward than
expected, and enabling the animals to cope with or to control a wanted event
( Boissy et al., 2007b ).
Investigations of what animals find positively reinforcing and of the animal's
behavioral expression during anticipation or expectation of the rewarding result,
often called positive anticipation, provide a basis for assessing positive emotional
states in animals ( Spruijt et al.,2001 ). When anticipating food rewards, rats ( van
der Harst et al.,2003 ), mink ( Vinke et al.,2004 ), poultry ( Moe et al., 2009 ), and
pigs ( Dudink et al., 2005 ) show increased locomotor activity and frequent behav-
ioral transitions, i.e. anticipatory hyperactivity, which reflect positive emotional
experience. In pigs, signaled positive stimuli such as extra space, food, or straw
lead to increased activity due to orientation toward the place where the reward
is offered and frequent behavioral transitions, most often combined with play
markers, i.e. hopping, scampering, pivoting, pawing, flopping, and head tossing
( Dudink et al., 2005 ).
In a typical positive contrast experiment an animal is first trained to
perform a task by giving it a reinforcer of a certain size (for a review, see
Flaherty, 1996 ). The animal is then given a larger reinforcer than they had
been given before. If the animal changes its behavior so that its response is
faster/more vigorous than that of a control group given the larger reinforcer
from the start, a successive positive contrast has occurred. Positive contrast
can be found for both appetitive and consummatory responses. It is the
difference between the expected value and the actual value that influences a
subject's behavior rather than the exact level of reinforcement. In his original
study, Crespi (1942) reported that rats for which the quantity of reward has
just been increased run faster towards the food reward than do rats having
always received the large quantity of reward. Similarly, sheep showed tran-
sient hyperactivity if a reward was of greater hedonic value than expected
( Greiveldinger et al., 2011 ). Nevertheless, due to the relatively small number
of studies, further research is needed to confirm the value of a positive con-
trast model in the study of potential positive emotions and their behavioral
expressions.
Enabling the animals to cope with or to control a wanted event (controlla-
bility of reward) may be another source of positive emotions. Social and
physical challenges can be perceived as positive experiences provided there