Exclusion performance in visual simple discrimination in dogs (Canis familiaris).

Abstract

Choices based on exclusion have been investigated in different species because of its emergent nature, leading to evidence of rudimentary symbolic behavior in non-verbal organisms. Simple discrimination procedures provide a simple method to investigate exclusion performance, in which each trial consists of the simultaneous presentation of two stimuli, one with a positive function (S+) and one with a negative function (S-). In exclusion probe trials, an undefined stimulus (UnS) is presented with a familiar S -, and choices based on exclusion may lead to choosing the UnS, excluding the previously known S -. Novelty control trials (S + /UnS) are also conducted to assess the possible preference for the UnS. In this case, if performance is not controlled by novelty, then the subjects must choose the S + and not the UnS. The present study investigated exclusion performance in visual simple simultaneous discrimination tasks in eight dogs. The results indicated that seven of eight dogs showed evidence of exclusion performance (p < .05). These findings corroborate the literature that shows that dogs are capable of responding by exclusion, suggesting that potentially symbolic behavior may rely on basic behavioral learning and conditioning principles.

Learning by Exclusion in Toddlers

“…Consistent results obtained by experiments using simple discrimination procedures conducted with dogs (Costa & Domeniconi, 2012;Freitas, Reis, Mizael, & Domeniconi, 2012;Zaine, Domeniconi, & Costa, 2014;Zaine, Domeniconi, & de Rose, 2016) and rats (Souza & Schmidt, 2014) have confirmed the robustness of exclusion responding. However, there is still insufficient evidence to confirm that a single trial produces learning of the emergent relation (Costa, Domeniconi, &de Souza, 2014;Costa et al, 2001).…”

High visual acuity revealed in dogs

“…It could have to do with an inherent difficulty in stimulus-reward association with this type of stimuli, as similar problems were described over 100 years ago [ 23 ]. Variation in training success is often found in studies on visual abilities in dogs [ 24 ] However, using real objects as stimuli and performing the visual task in the dog’s home environment could be a more fruitful approach [ 25 ], but, with the different illumination conditions and the need for exact control of the stimuli, this would have been difficult to implement in our experiment.…”

Awake fMRI Reveals Brain Regions for Novel Word Detection in Dogs

“…For example, a dog may select the novel item because it is novel among other stimuli, but not because it has learned all other stimuli and associates a new word with the novel item. Further, a dog's inherent preference for novelty could also explain performance initially labeled as learning by exclusion in previous behavioral studies [20,23,45]. A bias for novelty would therefore be reflected in the dog's brain as with her behavior.…”

“…Dogs can reliably retrieve an object based on a command combined with the name of the object, but this often requires months of training. Examples include Chaser, the border collie who learned over one thousand object-word pairings, and the border collie Rico, who demonstrated the ability to select a novel object among familiar objects based on a novel label [2,3,20]. Other studies examining word-learning in dogs have separated the noun from the verb in a given command, where the dog is commanded to "paw, touch or take" a named object.…”