Ludovic Calandreau

Ludovic Calandreau
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Ludovic verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
Verified
Ludovic verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
  • Senior scientist/ DR2 INRAE
  • Senior Researcher at French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE)

About

162
Publications
28,801
Reads
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2,321
Citations
Introduction
Ludovic Calandreau currently works at the Physiologie de la Reproduction et des Comportements (PRC), French National Institute for Agricultural Research. Ludovic does research in Neuroscience, Physiology and Behavioural Science. He investigates cognition (e.g. learning and memory abilities) and their underlying brain mechanisms in birds and mammals. https://twitter.com/EquipeCEB https://www6.val-de-loire.inrae.fr/umrprc-ethologie-cognition
Additional affiliations
French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE)
Position
  • Researcher
Description
  • https://physiologie-reproduction-comportements.val-de-loire.hub.inrae.fr/equipes-de-recherche/cognition-ethologie-bien-etre-animal
November 2008 - present
University of Tours
Position
  • Researcher
October 2008 - present
French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE)
Position
  • Researcher

Publications

Publications (162)
Article
Full-text available
Emotional contagion, the emotional state-matching of two individuals, has been documented in various species. Recent findings suggest emotional contagion could also take place between humans and domestic mammals. However, the range of targeted animal species and human emotions that have been studied is still limited, and the methodology to investig...
Article
The neuroendocrine control of seasonal breeding in vertebrates depends upon a TSH/DIO2-3 pathway located in the medio-basal hypothalamus. In male quail, early data demonstrated that this photoperiodic control is independent of testosterone. At least two strong predictions arise from this. First, testosterone is unlikely to exert any significant fee...
Article
Full-text available
Positive perception of humans, extensively documented in domestic mammals, remains comparatively underexplored in domestic birds like chickens, with existing studies largely focusing on fear reduction. This research evaluated whether chickens perceive humans positively, accounting for interaction types and breed differences. Two breeds (Lohmann LSL...
Preprint
Full-text available
Social interactions shape both physiological and behavioural development of offspring and poor care/early caregiver loss are known to promote negative outcomes in adulthood in both animals and humans. How affiliative behaviours impact future development of offspring remains unknown. Here, we used Equus caballus (domestic horse) as a model to invest...
Article
Full-text available
Chicken meat production in organic systems involves free-range access where animals can express foraging and locomotor behaviours. These behaviours may promote outdoor feed intake, but at the same time energy expenditure when exploring the outdoor area. More generally, the relationship of range use with metabolism, welfare including health, growth...
Article
Full-text available
Transitive inference (TI) is a disjunctive syllogism that allows an individual to indirectly infer a relationship between two components, by knowing their respective relationship to a third component (if A > B and B > C, then A > C). The common procedure is the 5-term series task, in which individuals are tested on indirect, unlearned relations. Fe...
Article
Full-text available
Many species, including humans exhibit a wide range of social behaviors that are crucial for the adaptation and survival of most species. Brain organization and function are shaped by genetic and environmental factors, although their precise contributions have been relatively understudied in the context of artificial selection. We used divergent li...
Article
Full-text available
La France est actuellement au premier rang des productions européennes de poulets biologiques. Cette production ne représente toutefois encore que quelques pourcents de la production nationale. L’élevage avicole biologique est souvent considéré comme respectueux du bien-être animal et de l’environnement. Cependant, au-delà de ces images positives q...
Article
Full-text available
Prenatal maternal stress (PMS) is known to shape the phenotype of the first generation offspring (F1) but according to some studies, it could also shape the phenotype of the offspring of the following generations. We previously showed in the Japanese quail that PMS increased the emotional reactivity of F1 offspring in relation to (i) a variation in...
Article
Full-text available
Foraging is known to be one of the most important activities in the behavioral budget of chickens. However, how these animals adapt different foraging strategies to diverse environmental variations is currently poorly understood. To gain further insight into this matter, in the present study, hens were submitted to the sloped-tubes task. In this ta...
Preprint
Full-text available
Vertebrates, including humans exhibit a wide range of social behaviors that are crucial for the adaptation and survival of most species. The brain organization and function are shaped by genetic and environmental factors, although their precise contributions have been poorly explored in the context of artificial selection. We used divergent lines o...
Preprint
Full-text available
Transitive inference (TI) is a disjunctive syllogism that allows an individual to indirectly infer a relationship between two components, by knowing their respective relationship to a third component (if A > B and B > C then A > C). The common procedure is the 5-terms series task, in which individuals are tested on indirect, unlearned relations. Fe...
Article
Full-text available
Individual differences in free-range chicken systems are important factors influencing how birds use the range (or not), even if individuals are in the same environmental conditions. Here, we investigated how various aspects of the birds' behavioral and cognitive tendencies, including their optimism/pessimism, cognitive flexibility, sociability, an...
Preprint
Full-text available
Foraging is known to be one of the most important activity in the behavioral budget of chickens. However, how these animals adapt different foraging strategies to diverse environmental variations is currently poorly understood. To gain further insight into this matter, in the present study, hens were submitted to a two tubes tasks. In this task, th...
Article
Cognitive enrichment is a promising but understudied type of environmental enrichment that aims to stimulate the cognitive abilities of animals by providing them with more opportunities to interact with (namely, to predict events than can occur) and to control their environment. In a previous study, we highlighted that farmed rainbow trout can pred...
Article
Full-text available
La science s’intéresse de longue date aux pratiques d’élevage et à la notion de sensibilité animale. En accord avec ces questionnements, il existe une demande sociétale croissante pour l’amélioration des conditions de vie des animaux de rente. Cette amélioration nécessite des connaissances de leurs capacités cognitives, qui permettent à l’animal de...
Article
Full-text available
Animal domestication leads to diverse behavioral, physiological, and neurocognitive changes in domesticated species compared to their wild relatives. However, the widely held belief that domesticated species are inherently less "intelligent" (i.e., have lower cognitive performance) than their wild counterparts requires further investigation. To inv...
Article
Full-text available
Communication of emotions plays a key role in intraspecific social interactions and likely in interspecific interactions. Several studies have shown that animals perceive human joy and anger, but few studies have examined other human emotions, such as sadness. In this study, we conducted a cross-modal experiment, in which we showed 28 horses two so...
Preprint
Full-text available
Chicken meat production in organic systems involves free-range access where animals can express foraging and locomotor behaviours. These behaviours may promote outdoor feed intake, but at the same time induce a loss of energy in exploring. More generally, the relationship of range use with metabolism, welfare, health, growth performance and meat qu...
Article
Full-text available
Research on fish cognition provides strong evidence that fish are endowed with high level cognitive skills. However, most studies on cognitive flexibility and generalization abilities, two key adaptive traits for captive animals, focused on model species, and farmed fish received too little attention. Environmental enrichment was shown to improve l...
Article
Full-text available
Glyphosate-based herbicides (GBH) are the most commonly used herbicides in agriculture. Several studies reported possible adverse effects on human and animal models after a GBH exposure. However, the effects of a temporary maternal exposure on the progeny have been poorly documented, especially in avian models. We investigated the effects of a hen...
Article
While most animals have received increasing attention for their welfare, consideration for fish welfare has started more recently, particularly since the recognition that fish have emotions and complex cognitive abilities. Housing conditions in fish farms do not always meet fish ethological requirements as these conditions lack sufficient sensory a...
Poster
Full-text available
Abstract: Transitive inference (TI) is a reasoning ability that allows animals to indirectly connect two components, knowing their respective relationship to each other (if A>B and B>C then A>C). Few bird species have been tested for TI to date, which limits our knowledge of the phylogenetic spread of such reasoning ability. Here, we tested TI in a...
Preprint
Full-text available
Communication of emotions plays a key role in intraspecific social interactions and likely in interspecific interactions. Several studies have shown that animals perceive human joy and anger, but few studies have examined other human emotions, such as sadness. In this study, we conducted a cross-modal experiment, in which we showed 28 horses two si...
Article
Full-text available
Several studies have shown that horses have the ability to cross-modally recognize humans by associating their voice with their physical appearance. However, it remains unclear whether horses are able to differentiate humans according to different criteria, such as the fact that they are women or men. Horses might recognize some human characteristi...
Article
Full-text available
Animals are widely believed to sense human emotions through smell. Chemoreception is the most primitive and ubiquitous sense, and brain regions responsible for processing smells are among the oldest structures in mammalian evolution. Thus, chemosignals might be involved in interspecies communication. The communication of emotions is essential for s...
Article
Full-text available
Free-range systems provide an outdoor range for broilers to give them the possibility to express a higher frequency and a wider range of behaviours, such as exploration, compared with those raised indoors. Greater variability in outdoor range use between individuals of the same flock is often reported. Individual variation in range use may result f...
Article
Full-text available
The mechanisms underlying the photoperiodic control of reproduction in mammals and birds have been recently clarified. In contrast, the potential impact of photoperiod on more complex, integrative processes, such as cognitive behaviors, remains poorly characterized. Here, we investigated the impact of contrasted long and short photoperiods (LP, 16...
Article
Full-text available
Chez les animaux, étudier la conscience ou les processus mentaux de manière générale reste relativement compliqué. En effet ces derniers ne peuvent pas rapporter verbalement s'ils sont conscients de leurs actions, de ce qu'ils ont ou non en mémoire, ou de ce qu'ils comprennent des informations présentées. Pour contourner cette difficulté inhérente...
Article
Cognitive abilities bring together all of the mental processes such as attention, memory, and reasoning skills that allow an animal to understand and to adapt to its environment. They are the basis of many behaviours. In this review, in a synthetic way, we will first make an inventory of current knowledge on the cognitive capacities of domestic bir...
Article
Full-text available
Recently, research on domestic mammals’ sociocognitive skills toward humans has been prolific, allowing us to better understand the human–animal relationship. For example, horses have been shown to distinguish human beings on the basis of photographs and voices and to have cross-modal mental representations of individual humans and human emotions....
Article
Full-text available
Improving the welfare of farm animals depends on our knowledge on how they perceive and interpret their environment; the latter depends on their cognitive abilities. Hence, limited knowledge of the range of cognitive abilities of farm animals is a major concern. An effective approach to explore the cognitive range of a species is to apply automated...
Article
Full-text available
Simple Summary Overall, this study has reported that environmental enrichment significantly displayed a series of differentially expressed genes and pathways related to cerebral activity, neural plasticity (neurotrophic markers), neurogenesis, and synaptogenesis, essentially in telencephalon, which may underpin the beneficial effects of a complex e...
Article
Full-text available
Occupational enrichment emerges as a promising strategy for improving the welfare of farmed animals. This form of enrichment aims to stimulate cognitive abilities of animals by providing them with more opportunities to interact with and control their environment. Predictability of salient daily events, and in particular predictability of feeding, i...
Article
Full-text available
Although there is evidence to suggest that animal domestication acts as a modulator of spatial orientation, little is known on how domesticated animals, compared to their wild counterparts, orientate themselves when confronted to different environmental cues. Here, using domesticated White Leghorn chicks, and their ancestor, the Red Junglefowl (Gal...
Article
Full-text available
The structural connectivity of animal brains can be revealed using post-mortem diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Despite the existence of several structural atlases of avian brains, few of them address the bird’s structural connectivity. In this study, a novel atlas of the structural connectivity is proposed for the male Japanese...
Article
A population average MRI brain template computed from 20 male Japanese Quails and a manually segmented atlas containing 194 regions. In this Version 2: the nomenclature in the file siwiaszczyk_LUT-ITK-SNAP_v2.txt was updated one slice of one region was completed in the file siwiaszczyk_atlas_v2.nii.gz. This project was supported by the APR Neur...
Preprint
Full-text available
Occupational enrichment emerges as a promising strategy for improving the welfare of farmed animals. This form of enrichment aims to stimulate cognitive abilities of animals by providing them with more opportunities to interact with and control their environment. Predictability ( i.e. , having information about the regularity of salient daily event...
Article
Full-text available
In a recent experiment, we showed that horses are sensitive to pet-directed speech (PDS), a kind of speech used to talk to companion animals that is characterized by high pitch and wide pitch variations. When talked to in PDS rather than adult-directed speech (ADS), horses reacted more favorably during grooming and in a pointing task. However, the...
Article
As the sensory systems of vertebrates develop prenatally, embryos perceive many environmental stimuli that can influence the ontogeny of their behaviour. Whether the nature and intensity of prenatal stimuli affect differently this ontogeny remains to be investigated. In this context, this study aimed to analyse the effects of prenatal auditory stim...
Article
Full-text available
Recent research on free-range chickens shows that individual behavioral differences may link to range use. However, most of these studies explored individual behavioral differences only at one time point or during a short time window, assessed differences when animals were out of their social group and home environment (barn and range), and in spec...
Article
Prenatal maternal stress (PMS) influences many facets of offspring’s’ phenotype including morphology, behaviour and cognitive abilities. Recent research suggested that PMS also induced epigenetic modifications. In the present study, we analysed, in the Japanese quail, the effects of PMS on the emotional reactivity and cognitive abilities of the F1...
Article
Full-text available
Chronic stress and the gut microbiota appear to comprise a feed-forward loop, which contributes to the development of depressive disorders. Evidence suggests that memory can also be impaired by either chronic stress or microbiota imbalance. However, it remains to be established whether these could be a part of an integrated loop model and be respon...
Article
Full-text available
Pet-directed speech (PDS) is a type of speech humans spontaneously use with their companion animals. It is very similar to speech commonly used when talking to babies. A survey on social media showed that 92.7% of the respondents used PDS with their horse, but only 44.4% thought that their horse was sensitive to it, and the others did not know or d...
Preprint
Full-text available
Chronic stress and the gut microbiota appear to comprise a feed-forward loop, which contributes to the development of depressive disorders. Evidence suggests that memory can also be impaired by either chronic stress or microbiota imbalance. However, it remains to be established whether these could be a part of an integrated loop model and be respon...
Article
A recent definition of animal welfare states that “the welfare of an animal is its positive mental and physical state related to the fulfilment of its physiological and behavioural needs in addition to its expectations. This state can vary depending on the animal’s perception of a given situation’. This definition confirms the importance of taking...
Article
For many fish species, environmental colour may act either as a source of stress or as a stress-buffer, alleviating behavioural and physiological responses after a stressful situation. While much is known on the effects of environmental colour on fish stress parameters, knowledge on the effects of stress on fish colour preferences is still lacking....
Article
Chronic stress profoundly affects forms of declarative memory, such as spatial memory, while it may spare non-declarative memory, such as cue-based memory. It is known, however, that the effects of chronic stress on memory systems may vary according to the level of training of an individual was submitted. Here, we investigated, in birds, how chroni...
Article
Full-text available
When animals prefer to make efforts to obtain food instead of acquiring it from freely available sources, they exhibit what is called contrafreeloading. Recently, individual differences in behavior, such as exploration, were shown to be linked to how prone an individual may be to contrafreeload. In this work, our main objective was to test whether...
Preprint
Full-text available
A recent definition of animal welfare states that "the welfare of an animal is its positive mental and physical state related to the fulfilment of its physiological and behavioural needs in addition to its expectations. This state can vary, depending on the animal's perception of a given situation". This definition confirms the importance of taking...
Preprint
Full-text available
It is now well-accepted that memory is a dynamic process, and that stress and training level may influence which memory system an individual engages when solving a task. In this work, we investigated whether and how chronic stress impacts spatial and cue-based memories according to training level. To that aim, control and chronically stressed Japan...
Article
Full-text available
Cognitive abilities were studied in rainbow trout, the first continental fish production in Europe. Increasing public concern for the welfare of farmed-fish species highlighted the need for better knowledge of the cognitive status of fish. We trained and tested 15 rainbow trout with an operant conditioning device composed of self-feeders positioned...
Article
Full-text available
A key question in the field of animal cognition is how animals comprehend their physical world. Object permanence is one of the fundamental features of physical cognition. It is the ability to reason about hidden objects and to mentally reconstruct their invisible displacements. This cognitive skill has been studied in a wide range of species but n...
Article
Full-text available
Recent studies have demonstrated that horses can recognize humans based simply on visual information. However, none of these studies have investigated whether this involves the recognition of the face itself, or simply identifying people from non-complex external clues, such as hair color. To go beyond this we wanted to know whether certain feature...
Article
Full-text available
Chronic stress is a strong modulator of cognitive processes, such as learning and memory. There is, however, great within-individual variation in how an animal perceives and reacts to stressors. These differences in coping with stress modulate the development of stress-induced memory alterations. The present study investigated whether and how chron...
Article
Full-text available
Animals can indirectly gather meaningful information about other individuals by eavesdropping on their third-party interactions. In particular, eavesdropping can be used to indirectly attribute a negative or positive valence to an individual and to adjust one’s future behavior towards that individual. Few studies have focused on this ability in non...
Article
Full-text available
Animals can navigate an environment relying on different sources of information, such as geometrical or featural cues. The favoring of one type of information over another depends on multiple factors, such as inter-individual differences in behavior and cognition. Free-range chickens present different range use patterns, which may be explained by b...
Article
Free-range broiler chickens usually show an uneven spatial utilization of an outdoor range. Due to behavioral and cognitive between-individual differences, some animals may be driven to associate food and conspecifics more strongly to the barn, causing them to be less prone to explore the range. In this study, we aimed to understand how broiler chi...
Article
Social animals can gain important benefits by inferring the goals behind the behavior of others. However, this ability has only been investigated in a handful of species outside of primates. In this study, we tested for the first time whether domestic horses can interpret human actions as goal directed. We used the classical “unwilling versus unabl...
Article
Full-text available
Horses are capable of identifying individual conspecifics based on olfactory, auditory or visual cues. However, this raises the questions of their ability to recognize human beings and on the basis of what cues. This study investigated whether horses could differentiate between a familiar and unfamiliar human from photographs of faces. Eleven horse...
Article
Full-text available
Inhibiting impulsive, less flexible behaviours is of utmost importance for individual adaptation in an ever-changing environment. However, problem-solving tasks may be greatly impacted by individual differences in behaviour, since animals with distinct behavioural types perceive and interact with their environment differently, resulting in variable...
Article
Avoidance of novelty, termed neophobia, protects animals from potential dangers but can also impair their adaptation to novel environments or food resources. This behaviour is particularly well described in birds but the neurobiological correlates remain unexplored. Here, we measured neuronal activity in the amygdala and the striatum, two brain reg...
Article
Full-text available
Simple Summary Recently, an increasing number of studies have investigated the expression and perception of emotions by non-human animals. In particular, it is of interest to determine whether animals can link emotion stimuli of different modalities (e.g., visual and oral) based on the emotions that are expressed (i.e., to recognize emotions cross-...
Article
Full-text available
The Japanese quail is a powerful model to characterize behavioral, physiological, and neurobiological processes in Galliformes. Behavioral tests have already been adapted for quail to assess memory systems, but despite the pivotal role of the hippocampus in this cognitive process, its involvement in spatial memory has not been demonstrated in this...
Article
Full-text available
Les animaux d'élevage sont confrontés à de multiples contraintes environnementales auxquelles ils doivent s'adapter. De plus en plus d'études s'intéressent à l'impact de l'environnement précoce sur les phénotypes des animaux et leurs capacités à s'adapter aux différents challenges rencontrés ultérieurement. Dans cette revue, nous nous intéresserons...
Article
The interaction between the gut microbiota (GM) and the brain has led to the concept of the microbiota-gut-brain axis but data for birds remain scarce. We tested the hypothesis that colonization of germ-free chicks from a quail line selected for a high emotional reactivity (E+) with GM from a line with low emotional reactivity (E-) would reduce the...
Article
Regular visual presence of humans is known to reduce chickens’ human-generated stress responses. Here we questioned whether, more than mere visual presence, human behaviour affects laying hen behaviour and subsequently their offspring’s behaviour. We hypothesized that human behaviour triggers maternal effects via variations in yolk hormone levels....
Article
Full-text available
Gonadotropin‐inhibitory hormone (GnIH) is a neuropeptide first discovered in the quail brain that is involved in the control of reproductive physiology and behaviors, and stress response. GnIH gene encodes a second peptide, GnIH‐related peptide‐2 (RP2), the distribution and function of which remain unknown. We therefore studied GnIH‐RP2 distributio...
Article
Recent studies provided evidence that a personality trait such as a trait for a high or a low emotionality can either promotes or impairs learning and memory performances. This variability can be partly explained because this trait may have opposite effect on memory performances depending on the memory system involved. The present study investigate...
Article
The positive aspect of emotions, like pleasure, remains overlooked in birds. Our aim was to contribute to the exploration of facial indicators of positive emotions. To observe contrasting emotional expressions, we used two lines of Japanese quail divergently selected on their inherent fearfulness: a fearful line (long tonic immobility duration: LTI...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Recent studies have demonstrated an effect of the gut microbiota on brain development and behavior leading to the concept of the microbiota-gut-brain axis. However, its effect on behavior in birds is unknown. The aim of the present study was to determine the effect of the absence of gut microbiota on emotional reactivity in birds by com...
Article
Full-text available
Emotions are recognized as strong modulators of cognitive capacities. However, studies have mainly focused on the effect of negative emotions, with few investigating positive emotions. Recent studies suggest that traits of personality can modulate the effects of emotion on cognitive performance. This study aimed to assess whether emotional states d...
Article
Full-text available
The infuence of embryonic microclimate on the behavioural development of birds remains unexplored. In this study, we experimentally tested whether chronic exposure to suboptimal temperatures engendered plasticity in the expression of fear-related behaviours and in the expression of the corticotropin-releasing factor in the brains of domestic chicks...
Article
The use of conditioned reinforcers is increasingly promoted in animal training. Surprisingly, the efficiency of their use remains to be demonstrated in horses. This study aimed to determine whether an auditory signal which had previously been associated with a food reward 288 times could be used as a conditioned reinforcer to replace the primary re...
Article
Characteristics of attachment were assessed in peer- and object-reared lambs, and compared to mothered subjects by taking into consideration distress, proximity seeking, and exploration during two separation-reunion tests in both the familiar and a novel environment. Plasma cortisol and oxytocin were assayed as physiological indicators of stress an...
Article
The gut microbiota is involved in host behaviour and memory in mammals. Consequently, it may also influence emotional behaviour and memory in birds. Quail from two genetic lines with different fearfulness (LTI: long tonic immobility, n = 37; STI: short tonic immobility, n = 32) were either or not supplemented with a probiotic (Pediococcus acidilact...
Article
We assessed whether the ratio of dietary n-6/n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) during egg formation engenders transgenerational maternal effects in domestic chicks. We analyzed yolk lipid and hormone concentrations, and HPA-axis activity in hens fed a control diet (high n-6/n-3 ratio) or a diet enriched in n-3 PUFAs (low n-6/n-3 ratio) for 6 c...
Article
Full-text available
The relationship between personality and learning abilities has become a growing field of interest. Studies have mainly focused on the relationship with performance, such as the speed of acquisition. In this study, we hypothesised that personality could in part also be related to a certain predisposition of an individual to switch more easily from...
Article
Full-text available
Ce dossier a préalablement été publié par l’Inra sur son site : http://institut.Inra.fr/Missions/Eclairer-les-decisions/Expertises/Toutes-les-actualites/Conscience-animale
Article
Full-text available
Ce dossier a préalablement été publié par l’Inra sur son site : http://institut.Inra.fr/Missions/Eclairer-les-decisions/Expertises/Toutes-les-actualites/Conscience-animale
Article
La question des émotions des animaux d’élevage s’inscrit dans la volonté d’améliorer les conditions d’élevage en prenant en compte leur bien-être. La genèse des émotions repose sur la capacité cognitive des individus à percevoir, évaluer et réagir à leur environnement. La capacité de perception met en jeu différentes sensorialités et participe à la...
Article
Chronic stress is considered detrimental for an individual as it is a long-lasting negative emotional state, without or with a limited habituation. The reactivity and sensitivity of animals to stressors depend on the animal's organismic characteristics such as sex. In poultry, the studies dealing with chronic stress were mainly performed on females...

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