Bestial boredom: a biological perspective on animal boredom and suggestions for its scientific investigation

Burn, Charlotte C.

doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2017.06.006

Cited by 117 publications

(102 citation statements)

References 119 publications

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“…Only three studies to date have compared human and dog perception of own vs other species (Guo et al 2009;Racca et al 2012;Törnqvist et al 2015); all support our results of a lower PVT for all stimuli by dogs, i.e., dogs were quicker than humans, regardless of stimuli or method used. It might be argued that dogs have shorter attention spans (although this has not yet been investigated), are more easily distracted/bored (Burn 2017), or tend to avoid fixed stares, but this is unlikely, since the previous studies have reinforced the dogs to look at the stimuli. Another plausible explanation is that dogs simply have quicker processing mechanisms in general.…”

Section: Comparison Of Human and Dog Perception Of Facial Expressionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perception of dynamic facial expressions of emotion between dogs and humans

2020

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Facial expressions are a core component of the emotional response of social mammals. In contrast to Darwin's original proposition, expressive facial cues of emotion appear to have evolved to be species-specific. Faces trigger an automatic perceptual process, and so, inter-specific emotion perception is potentially a challenge; since observers should not try to "read" heterospecific facial expressions in the same way that they do conspecific ones. Using dynamic spontaneous facial expression stimuli, we report the first inter-species eye-tracking study on fully unrestrained participants and without pre-experiment training to maintain attention to stimuli, to compare how two different species living in the same ecological niche, humans and dogs, perceive each other's facial expressions of emotion. Humans and dogs showed different gaze distributions when viewing the same facial expressions of either humans or dogs. Humans modulated their gaze depending on the area of interest (AOI) being examined, emotion, and species observed, but dogs modulated their gaze depending on AOI only. We also analysed if the gaze distribution was random across AOIs in both species: in humans, eye movements were not correlated with the diagnostic facial movements occurring in the emotional expression, and in dogs, there was only a partial relationship. This suggests that the scanning of facial expressions is a relatively automatic process. Thus, to read other species' facial emotions successfully, individuals must overcome these automatic perceptual processes and employ learning strategies to appreciate the inter-species emotional repertoire.

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Section: Comparison Of Human and Dog Perception Of Facial Expressionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perception of dynamic facial expressions of emotion between dogs and humans

2020

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“…for example religious or indigenous knowledge systems [112,113]. In particular, expanding our understanding of animals' experiences, both positive and negative, is one of the key foci of animal welfare science [114,115], as well as of researchers in other disciplines [20,116]. To facilitate thoughtful, evidence-based conservation action, it is important to systematically evaluate both the situations likely to generate unpleasant experiences (and/or impair animals' ability to have positive ones) and whether wild animals can have such experiences at all.…”

Section: First Do No Harm: Similarities and Differencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

I Am a Compassionate Conservation Welfare Scientist: Considering the Theoretical and Practical Differences Between Compassionate Conservation and Conservation Welfare

Beausoleil

2020

Animals

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Compassionate Conservation and Conservation Welfare are two disciplines whose practitioners advocate consideration of individual wild animals within conservation practice and policy. However, they are not, as is sometimes suggested, the same. Compassionate Conservation and Conservation Welfare are based on different underpinning ethics, which sometimes leads to conflicting views about the kinds of conservation activities and decisions that are acceptable. Key differences between the disciplines appear to relate to their views about which wild animals can experience harms, the kinds of harms they can experience and how we can know about and confidently evidence those harms. Conservation Welfare scientists seek to engage with conservation scientists with the aim of facilitating ongoing incremental improvements in all aspects of conservation, i.e., minimizing harms to animals. In contrast, it is currently unclear how the tenets of Compassionate Conservation can be used to guide decision-making in complex or novel situations. Thus, Conservation Welfare may offer modern conservationists a more palatable approach to integrating evidence-based consideration of individual sentient animals into conservation practice and policy.

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“…In this area of conflicting interests, laboratory animals are currently frequently subject to restrictions characterized by routine, predictability, and lack of novel stimuli. These adjectives describe the human phenomenon of boredom very well, and indeed there is convincing evidence that the unpleasant affective state of boredom can also be found in animals [30]. Against this background, the spontaneous behavior of the animals in the home cage is of particular interest as it allows early warning signals to be detected as well as the evaluation of the success of refinement measures.…”

Section: Spontaneous Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing Affective State in Laboratory Rodents to Promote Animal Welfare—What Is the Progress in Applied Refinement Research?

Jirkof

Rudeck

Lewejohann

2019

Animals

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An animal’s capacity to suffer is a prerequisite for any animal welfare concern, and the minimization of suffering is a key aim of refinement research. In contrast to the traditional focus on avoiding or reducing negative welfare states, modern animal welfare concepts highlight the importance of promoting positive welfare states in laboratory animals. Reliable assessments of affective states, as well as the knowledge of how to elicit positive affective states, are central to this concept. Important achievements have been made to assess pain and other negative affective states in animals in the last decades, but it is only recently that the neurobiology of positive emotions in humans and animals has been gaining more interest. Thereby, the need for promotion of positive affective states for laboratory animals is gaining more acceptance, and methods allowing the assessment of affective states in animals have been increasingly introduced. In this overview article, we present common and emerging methods to assess affective states in laboratory rodents. We focus on the implementation of these methods into applied refinement research to identify achieved progress as well as the future potential of these tools to improve animal welfare in animal-based research.

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Bestial boredom: a biological perspective on animal boredom and suggestions for its scientific investigation

Cited by 117 publications

References 119 publications

Perception of dynamic facial expressions of emotion between dogs and humans

Perception of dynamic facial expressions of emotion between dogs and humans

I Am a Compassionate Conservation Welfare Scientist: Considering the Theoretical and Practical Differences Between Compassionate Conservation and Conservation Welfare

Assessing Affective State in Laboratory Rodents to Promote Animal Welfare—What Is the Progress in Applied Refinement Research?

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