Behavior: Motivation

• Characteristics of certain types of brain processes that lie between incoming sensory information and the execution of behavior
• These processes underlie capacities such as anticipation of the future, insight, ability to extrapolate from data, frustration etc.
• Sometimes associated with consciousness
• Concept of self

• Animal welfare concerns are based on the assumption that non-human animals can subjectively experience emotional (affective) states and hence can suffer or experience pleasure.
• Accurate assessment of animal emotions (affect) is an important goal in animal welfare research

• Emotional arousal: emotional intensity or how activated the animal is
• HPA
• Heart rate
• Behavioral responses
• Emotional valence: whether the emotional state is positive or negative. This is critical to welfare

• Cognitive processes influence and are influenced by an individuals emotional state
• Information processing, attention, learning, memory and decision making
• Reliable indicator of emotional valence
• Not evidence that animal consciously experience such states (same as behavior and physiology)
• Affective state alters cognition
• More positive emotional state is associated with increased likelihood of judging ambiguous information positively (optimistic cognitive bias) more negative emotional state results in the opposite (pessimistic cognitive bias)
• Animals more optimistic cognitive bias, ie. more positive emotional state, in enriched environments.

• "Cognitive bias": the influence of emotion on cognition
• -based on the concept that depressed humans interpret ambiguous stimuli negatively
• Judgment bias tasks: behaviors showing the anticipation of a positive or negative event in a response to ambiguous stimuli

• Identify and alleviate the sources of some important frustration-related welfare problems
• Reveal why abnormal activities like stereotypic behaviors are so common in captive animals
• Improve training methods, manipulate mating and maternal care

• Causal explanation of behavior
• Proximate, mechanistic explanation of why an animal is performing a particular behavior pattern

• Motivation is the process within the brain controlling which behaviors and physiological changes occur and when
• Motivation involves goals, actions, behavior sequences, homeostasis, drive and perhaps feelings and emotions
• A concept used to understand the variability of behavior
• A concept used to explain decision making. What well the animal do next when faced with choices
• Why animals sometimes respond to stimuli and sometimes ignore them

• Not understanding the precise physiological mechanisms
• Allows for simple modelling
• Sometime mechanism is helpful (sow nest building)
• Neuroscience and motivation see

• Feeding (hunger)
• Drinking (thirst)
• Thermoregulation
• Sex
• Aggression
• Defense
• Exploration
• Migration
• Foraging
• nest-building
• Incubation
• Social interaction

• Causal factors
• -inputs to decision making center
• -some factors may be irrelevant
• -factors may change slowly (hormonal) or rapidly (environmental)
• Various stimuli
• Behavioral change = manifestation of change in causal factors
• Motivational state: combination of all levels of all causal factors
• Combined physiological and perceptual state of an animal, as represented in its brain
• Models demonstrate 2 factors only in reality there are numerous factors and one must consider a multi-dimensional state

• The probability of performing a given behavior and the frequency, or vigour, with which it is performed
• eg. the more hungry the rat is:
• the more likely it is to feed,
• the more rapidly is will eat
• the greater the quantity it will consume

• 1. Changes responsiveness to a constant (internal or external) stimulus
• 2. Facilitates goal-directed behavior
• 3. Potentiates some species-typical behaviors
• 4. Facilitates decision making

• Some motivations are concerned with regulating the body's internal state (feeding, drinking, thermoregulation)
• The regulation of a variable within narrow limits is called homeostasis

• Negative feedback (if internal variable goes above or below the optimal, deviation is detected and corrected)
• Feeforward (the animal anticipates departures of an internal variable from its optimal value and pre-empts them)

Some motivations do not regulate the body's internal state, but have more strategic objectives (reproduction, defense of resources)

• Sexual motivation fluctuates during the oestrus cycle, peaking at the start of ovulation
• Blood concentrations of oestrogen and testosterone peak just before the start of ovulation and may be responsible for increased motivation
• Injection of these hormones increases sexual motivation

• Internal - hormones, etc
• External - environment (flavor of food, season changing, time of day, smell of food, presence of predators)

• External stimuli can acquire or lose the ability to motivate behavior through learning
• -food that makes sick, fish learning to fight by signalling light...

• In a complex environment, many behaviors need to be flexible
• In many cases, motivation does not activate a fixed response, but activates behavior towards a goal
• It is said to be goal-directed or purposive

• Some responses are hard-wired and always take the same form (sexually aroused female rat)
• Appetitive behavior, active, searching flexible behavior
• Consummatory Behavior, more sterotyped, unlearnt; species typical

• In a complex environment, an animal has many things it needs to do
• It can't satisfy all these motivations at once
• It must decide which behavior to perform when and for how long
• ie. Incubating vs feeding in hens & thermoregulation vs feeding in desert lizards
• These motivations interact, and factors are involved that involve switching between motivations: the relative strength of the motivations and the cost of swithing

• Poor welfare due to unfulfilled motivations
• Evolution has shaped animals so that the most important behaviors are most highly motivated
• Animals will suffer when highly motivated behaviors are prevented
• Frustration
• Measuring motivation is possible with demand experiments

• Poor welfare due to unfulfilled motivations
• Understanding stereotypic behavior
• Learning and training
• Promote species typical behavior