Doctoral Student Profile

Tania Blackmore

Supervisors: Mary Foster, Bill Temple

Learning in cattle with reference to automatic milking
My primary interest is animal learning and behaviour. My PhD focuses on learning and behaviour associated with Automatic Milking (AMS), specifically, how cows learn to get to the AMS unit voluntarily with minimal human interaction. Due to the voluntary nature of AMS, cows are faced with learning a range of new behaviours distinctly separate from conventional milking. These include learning how to get to the AMS, and learning how to get used to being milked robotically. The primary focus of my research investigates the “how to get there” aspect of learning the automatic system. With existing research indicating that cows can perceive yellow, we looked at whether cows could learn to approach a yellow stimulus (“sign”) as a visual cue to the correct path across a series of experiments. Firstly, cows learnt to discriminate yellow from grey stimuli, learning to approach the yellow stimuli only. Cows then successfully learnt to follow the yellow sign when it was randomly located in single and double T-mazes. Finally, cows were able to use yellow signs to aid them in learning the correct path in a series of novel, multiple turn mazes. Therefore cows have the ability to utilise a visual cue, as mazes were successfully solved with the provision of signs, but performance decreased when the signs were removed.

Figure 1. Cow 3112 doing a left-left correct trial in the double T-maze.