Research overview: cognitive bias and emotional state in cats

The cognitive bias paradigm tests whether an animal in a negative affective state judges ambiguous cues more pessimistically, providing a window into emotion. This overview surveys research applying judgment-bias tasks to cats, in which animals are trained to expect reward or non-reward at distinct locations and then tested with intermediate, ambiguous cues. It discusses how housing conditions, stress, and enrichment shift cats toward optimistic or pessimistic responses, and the methodological challenges of running such tests with cats. The topic links objective behavioural measures to feline emotional welfare, offering tools to evaluate how environments and husbandry affect cats' underlying affective states.