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Project

A cognitive bias study into individual bonobo emotions.

Just like humans, animals can experience emotions like joy, excitement, sadness and depression. However, unlike we do in human studies, we cannot simply ask animals how they feel. Scientists have used behavioural and physiological measures to identify animal emotions. Yet, these measures are difficult to interpret and often only measure the level of arousal of the emotions, and not if it is a positive or negative emotion. New insights from scientific studies suggest that the animal emotions influence cognitive performances like: attention, memory and judgement. Studying changes in an animal's cognition can thus give information about their emotional state. The proposed research project aims to study the cognitive performance of bonobos, one of our closest living evolutionary relatives, as index for their emotional state. Furthermore, we aim to complement and validate the results from the cognitive tasks with physiological and behavioural measures. Additionally, we want to study what individual characteristics determine these emotional states by asking questions like: are female bonobos happier than males? or, are bonobos that are less sociable moodier than social bonobos? Results from this project provide the opportunity to get a view into the mind bonobos and get a better understanding of their emotions. Because the bonobo is our evolutionary cousin, this will enable us to understand the evolutionary past of human emotions.
Date:1 Oct 2018 →  31 Oct 2019
Keywords:BONOBO (PAN PANISCUS)
Disciplines:Animal biology, Veterinary medicine
Project type:Collaboration project