Award details

Cognitive bases of competitive behaviour and information transfer in domestic pigs

Reference	BB/C510559/1
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Professor Richard Byrne
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors	Dr Suzanne Held, Professor Michael Mendl
Institution	University of St Andrews
Department	Psychology
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	85,466
Status	Completed
Type	Research Grant
Start date	01/07/2005
End date	28/02/2009
Duration	44 months

Abstract

The three objectives of the project are directed at understanding the ability of domestic pigs in social exploitation of information held by others: (1) To find out if pigs can learn to deceive a competitor in a foraging task, we use an informed forager task previously adapted for pigs by ourselves. We have already shown that pigs can detect and exploit superior knowledge of competitors, and that they discriminate and remember locations of food rewards of differing value. Now we follow up previous evidence suggestive of pigs ability to deceive competitors even without opportunity to acquire tactics by reinforcement, using a new experiment in which competitors differ in rank and rewards differ in quality. (2) To investigate the ability of pigs to learn motor actions by observation, we use a manipulable device that can be set to several modes of food delivery. Imitative learning will be studied in 3 stages: learning and remembering simple actions after a delay, to focus on symbolic representation of actions; learning daily-changed settings for food delivery, to detect the potential of motor imitation to aid everyday foraging; and acquiring a complex sequence of movements, as a first step towards acquisition of novel complex skills by observational (program-level) learning; (3) To investigate factors affecting the social transmission of information through groups of pigs, the same kind of device will be used to produce novel modes of food extraction into several different groups of pigs, focusing on the effect of demonstrator pigs on rate of speed. We will vary the presence and number of demonstrators, and the effect of their dominance status compared to that of learners. Joint with BB/C510316/1

Summary

unavailable

Committee	Closed Committee - Animal Sciences (AS)
Research Topics	Animal Health, Animal Welfare, Neuroscience and Behaviour
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	X - not in an Initiative
Funding Scheme	Industrial Partnership Award (IPA)

Associated awards:

BB/C510316/1 Cognitive bases of competitive behaviour and information transfer in domestic pigs.

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