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A promising novel judgement bias test to evaluate affective states in dogs (Canis familiaris)

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Abstract

The judgement bias test represents one of the most applied tools to evaluate animals’ optimistic/pessimistic attitude and to infer their emotional and welfare state accordingly. The judgement bias test (JBT) has been used several times with dogs (Canis familiaris), in most cases using a spatial test that evaluates the dog’s attitude towards a bowl placed in ambiguous positions (located between two unambiguous trained positions associated with opposite outcomes). Results are contrasting and methodological and statistical caveats emerged: dogs struggled to learn the association between unambiguous positions and their outcomes, they hardly discriminated between adjacent locations and they might be influenced by researchers. Therefore, we propose a novel paradigm, aimed at easing the learning process and at achieving more reliable measures. Improvements of the novel paradigm are the increased difference between payoffs of trained locations, the reduction of the number of trials and of their length and the removal of the potential influence of researchers. Results showed that 98% of dogs reached the learning criterion and that their learning appeared more stable: dogs behaved differently between the two trained stimuli and the variability of responses towards these stimuli was lower than the one towards ambiguous stimuli. Behavioural analyses confirmed that dogs fully learned outcomes associated with trained stimuli and that they were hesitant towards ambiguous stimuli. Furthermore, dogs managed to successfully discriminate between each pair of adjacent locations. These results suggest that this protocol is a promising tool to assess judgement biases in dogs and to evaluate their affective state.

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Data availability

Datasets generated and analysed during the current study are available from Zenodo repository (URL https://zenodo.org/record/5106452#.YPBTMegzZhE, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5106452).

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Acknowledgements

We thank all the owners and their dogs for taking part in our study with willingness to help scientific research on canine welfare. We thank Alessandro Gallo, Tiziano Travain, Giulia Bagna and Fanel Coppola for their precious help in apparatus construction; we thank Giulia Bagna and Fanel Coppola also for protocol adjustments, data collection and behavioural analyses.

Funding

This study was supported by a doctoral grant to Carlotta Burani from the University of Parma.

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Authors and Affiliations

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Contributions

Conceptualization: CB, PV; data curation and data collection: CB; formal analysis: CB, AP; resources: PV; writing—original draft: CB; writing—review and editing: PV, AP. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Carlotta Burani.

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Conflict of interest

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

Ethical approval

The ethical committee for animal testing of the University of Parma declared that a special permission to use pet dogs in this behavioural study is not required in Italy (Decreto legislativo 4 marzo 2014, n. 26, Art. 2). Furthermore, the committee reported that this study accomplishes ethical requirements in compliance with the law about the use of animals in clinical and zootechnical studies (PROT.N. 11/CE/2019). All the dogs’ owners consented to take part in the study.

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Burani, C., Pelosi, A. & Valsecchi, P. A promising novel judgement bias test to evaluate affective states in dogs (Canis familiaris). Anim Cogn 25, 837–852 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-021-01596-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-021-01596-z

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