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The team
Students
Océane Amichaud
Amichaud Océane
oceane.amichaud@inrae.fr
Doctoral student
Team CEB, UMR PRC
PhD topic: Exploring the concept of agency in cows to improve welfare.

Supervisors: Léa LANSADE and Ludovic CALANDREAU

New approaches to animal welfare now include the notion of a positive mental state. Rather than simply seeking to minimise negative experiences such as stress and pain, these approaches aim to create situations that generate positive affective states, within a “positive welfare” framework. One emerging theory of positive welfare, proposed by Špinka, centres on the concept of agency. According to this theory, enabling animals to control their environment, better predict what happens to them and make informed choices could promote a positive mental state.

This raises the question of the level of agency animals can achieve: to what extent do they perceive and understand their environment sufficiently to make choices that benefit them both in the short and longer term? Špinka’s framework proposes four levels of agency of increasing complexity. These range from basic stimulus–response processes to a level requiring complex cognitive abilities, enabling animals to make choices with long-term benefits through prospective planning and autobiographical reflection.

This project aims to determine what level of agency cows can achieve and to propose environmental enrichment suited to their abilities.

Education and Career

  • Since 2024: PhD in Animal Behaviour and Cognition within the Cognition, Ethology and Animal Welfare team (CEB – INRAE, Nouzilly, France).
  • 2023–2024: Research and Development Engineer in Pig Production, INRAE, Saint-Gilles, and IFIP–French Pig Institute, Pacé, France.
  • 2021–2023: Master’s degree in Ethology, specialising in Animal and Human Behaviour, University of Rennes, France.
  • 2018–2021: Bachelor’s degree in Life Sciences, specialising in Ecology and Organismal Biology, University of Poitiers, France.

 

 

HAL : Dernières publications

  • [hal-05789729] Cows visually discriminate and cross-modally recognise familiar and unfamiliar human faces in videos

    Social recognition has been studied and demonstrated in many species. In domesticated species, the long evolutionary history shared with humans has led to investigations into their cognitive abilities towards humans, particularly regarding discrimination and recognition of humans. The present study investigated whether cows are capable of visual discrimination and cross-modal recognition of familiar and unfamiliar humans. Thirty-two cows were exposed to two tests: a visual preference test, during which two silent videos were shown simultaneously – each displaying either a familiar or an unfamiliar human face – and a cross-modal test, during which the videos were accompanied by either a congruent or incongruent voice. During the visual preference test, cows looked significantly longer at the video showing the unfamiliar person (p = 0.028). In the cross-modal test, they looked significantly longer at the video that was congruent with the voice being played (p = 0.014). These two results show that cows are able to discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar individuals and form cross-modal representations of these people. Based on these results, future research should explore whether cows can adjust their behaviour depending on the person they are interacting with – a capacity that may reflect their agency in human-animal relationships.

    ano.nymous@ccsd.cnrs.fr.invalid (Océane Amichaud) 09 Oct 2026

    https://hal.inrae.fr/hal-05789729v1
  • [hal-05789521] Cows react to human emotions displayed in videos and use this information to guide subsequent interaction choices

    The ability to perceive and interpret emotions from others provides clear evolutionary advantages for social animals. Domestic animals live in close contact with humans, making human emotional cues particularly relevant for them. Understanding how these animals recognise, memorise, and respond to human emotional signals is therefore crucial to investigating their cognitive capacities and their active role in interspecific social interactions. Thus, this study investigates whether cows can discriminate between human expressions and use this information to guide their behaviour in a subsequent choice test. Thirty-nine cows were shown two 30-second videos: one of an experimenter expressing joy and another expressing anger through facial and vocal cues. Afterward, both experimenters simultaneously presented themselves to the cows in a choice test. During video exposure, cows looked longer at the anger video and showed a left-eye bias, suggesting right-hemisphere processing of negatively valenced stimuli. They also displayed more behaviours indicative of a negative perception. In the subsequent choice test, cows spent significantly more time close to the experimenter who had previously expressed joy. These results demonstrate that cows can discriminate and remember human emotional expressions and use this information to guide their choices in future social interactions. This highlights their role as active participants rather than passive observers in interspecific relationships, and provides insight into contexts where such abilities may be expressed, with potential implications for enhancing human-animal relationships and welfare.

    ano.nymous@ccsd.cnrs.fr.invalid (Océane Amichaud) 09 Oct 2026

    https://hal.inrae.fr/hal-05789521v1