Hunger affects cognitive performance of dairy calves
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hunger remains a significant animal welfare concern as restricted feeding practices are common on farms. Studies to date have focused on negative effects on health and productivity but little research has addressed the feeling of hunger , mostly due to methodological difficulties in assessing animals' subjective experiences. Here, we explored the use of a cognitive approach to disentangle motivational hunger (a normal state that is of limited welfare concern) from distressful hunger (a state associated with intense negative emotions). Cognitive performance in a foraging task is expected to follow an inverted U relationship with hunger levels, providing an opportunity to make inferences about different hunger states. We assessed the effect of milk restriction on calf cognition in two experiments using a modified hole-board test. Experiment 1 showed that reducing milk allowance from 12 to 6 l d −1 impaired all measures of cognitive performance. Experiment 2 showed that the same type of feed restriction also disrupted calves’ capacity to re-learn. We conclude that hunger associated with reduced milk allowance can disrupt cognitive performance of dairy calves, a result consistent with the experience of distressful hunger.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".