Cognitive bias in animal behavior science: A philosophical perspective

Emotional states of animals influence their cognitive abilities as well as their behavior and welfare. Assessing emotional states is, therefore, indispensable for animal welfare science as well as for many fields of neuroscience, animal behavior science etc. This can be done in different ways. This paper focuses on the so-called cognitive judgment bias test, which has gained special attention in the last two decades and became a highly important way of measuring emotional states in non-human animals. However, less attention has been given to the epistemology of the cognitive judgment bias test and to disentangling the relevance of different steps in the underlying cognitive mechanisms. This paper sheds some light on both, the epistemology of the methods, and the architecture of the underlying cognitive abilities of the tested animals. Based on this reconstruction, we propose a scheme for classifying and assessing different cognitive abilities involved in cognitive judgment.