Do young domestic pigs (Sus scrofa domestica) rely on object-specific cues in a simultaneous discrimination task?
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Agricultural Science, Animal Behavior
- Keywords
- domestic pig, spatial memory, feature cues
- Copyright
- © 2014 Nawroth et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. Do young domestic pigs (Sus scrofa domestica) rely on object-specific cues in a simultaneous discrimination task? PeerJ PrePrints 2:e281v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.281v1
Abstract
Finding and relocating food sources is not only crucial for individuals in changing natural environments - it is also of importance in domestic animals under husbandry conditions, for instance to reduce stress when transferring animals into new housing conditions. This study makes a first attempt by investigating young pigs´ use of conflicting spatial and feature cues in a simultaneous discrimination task. In a training phase, subjects (n = 9) first learned to approach a food container with distinct spatial and feature cues. In a subsequent test phase, spatial and feature cues were brought into conflict. Results show that young pigs significantly preferred to approach the spatial position rather than the feature cue of a food container – at least for the visual domain - while inter-individual differences in choice behaviour suggest that animals recognized the changed context. However, the actual test setup did not exclude alternatives to the use of spatial cues, e.g. instrumental learning. The results may contribute to a better understanding of learning mechanisms in domestic pigs and could be used to improve husbandry designs, reduce stress levels after transfer and may prove to be helpful in designing further test paradigms investigating discriminative learning abilities in the domestic pig.
Supplemental Information
Figure 1: General setup of learning and test sessions.
Three potential reward locations were positioned in a semi-circle in the test area. E = experimenter, x = hidden food reward
Table 1: Data on individual choice behavior
Scores in bold are significantly above chance level (P < 0.05)