M2 Internship<br>n°1 | 2020

Keywords judgment bias, emotional state, nestor notabilis, animal welfare, vocalisations

From January to June 2020, I had the privilege of working at Animal Mind Lab in Christchurch, New Zealand, under the supervision of Dr Alex Taylor and Dr Amalia Bastos. For three month, our work was based at the Kea aviary of the Willowbank Wildlife Reserve, an amazing place dedicated to conservation effort in New Zealand. This experience allowed us to engage in public education and advocate for wildlife conservation.

Resume of our project

How important is the link between vocalisations and internal emotional states? Emotional state influences cognition by three types of cognitive biases: attention, memory and judgment biases. The judgment bias test (JBT) has been introduced to measure animals’ own judgment as an indicator of their emotional state and welfare.

Here, we created a paradigm using a visual JBT where we tested the effect of two vocalisations (warble call as a playful call, hence “positive-valenced” and trill call as an alarm call, hence “negative valenced”) on 8 kea (Nestor notabilis). For this experiment, kea were trained to distinguish the presentation of a positive (rewarding) or a negative (non-rewarding) cue, and then tested on novel ambiguous to probe their judgment of them. Simultaneously with the introduction of each ambiguous cue, kea heard a playback of a vocalisation.

We measured the latency to approach the cue for one positive, one negative and three types of ambiguous cues, using colored flap doors (0%, 20%, 40%, 60% and 80% grey) and a specific apparatus. Using Bayesian multilevel analysis, we did not find strong differences in latency between the two vocalisations conditions. Yet, kea showed a remarkable learning capacity and good consistency throughout the experiment.

Despites the unpredictable behavioural inter-individual differences of kea, this study provides robust support to set up JBT test on Psittacidae and calls for the analysis of animal welfare through the lens of animal emotional state as a support of other most commonly used tests.

Click here to read my Master’s report

Here to find the website of Amalia Bastos

And here for the website of the Animal Mind lab