Overall, skunks do have the ability to use visual patterns to solve problems even though they have poor vision and difficulty in learning the tasks without a lot of experience. doi.org/10.1037/com0...

Although the task was hard for the skunks to learn, they did finally solve it (after 1000s of trials). They seemed to be responding to visual patterns of contact and perceptual containment between food and painted lines. Only one skunk learned to pull supportive over unsupportive slats.

There were functional slats (real wooden slats that gave subjects both visual and functional information when manipulated) and purely representational slats that were painted lines that provided only visual information.

Johnson-Ulrich et al. presented the slat-pulling task to three striped skunks to assess whether they could reason about visual patterns of support. doi.org/10.1037/com0...

The results provide additional support for greater attention to housing conditions for laboratory animals, as these may influence welfare as well as the experimental outcome in important ways.

Rats raised in a “naturalistic” environment with wooden branches, tunnels, and a wooden shelter and variable location of food, water, and shelter displayed attenuated retrieval of context fear conditioning.

In comparison to a standard-housing control group, rats that were raised in an enriched environment demonstrated shorter latency to learn a platform reversal in the Morris water maze, which may suggest that housing conditions influenced behavioral flexibility.

The opportunity to interact with and adapt to a varied environment has cognitive benefits and may contribute to well-being. Laboratory animals are often maintained under conditions that do not afford such opportunities.

The authors concluded that this may reflect a species-specific win-stay bias and the differential consequences of staying versus leaving (a conditioned-reinforcement account of intertemporal choice in patch-leaving contexts).

For the binary-choice condition, the pigeons preferred the SS option. In Patch-L and Patch-S conditions, pigeons preferred to stay at the patch rather than leave in both cases, and even when the stay response was more effortful.

Gomes-Ng et al. replicated this research using pigeons. There were three conditions, one with the binary-choice task and two patch-leaving tasks in which staying at a patch either led to an LL (Patch-L) or SS (Patch-S) reward. doi.org/10.1037/com0...

Enhanced context fear was more persistent than conventional context fear conditioning which has potentially optimistic implications for exposure-based treatments.

doi.org/10.1037/bne0000608