The odour of an unfamiliar stressed or relaxed person affects dogs' responses to a cognitive bias test.

ABSTRACT: Dogs can discriminate stressed from non-stressed human odour samples, but the effect on their cognition is unstudied. Using a cognitive bias task, we tested how human odours affect dogs' likelihood of approaching a food bowl placed at three ambiguous locations ("near-positive", "middle" and "near-negative") between trained "positive" (rewarded) and "negative" (unrewarded) locations. Using odour samples collected from three unfamiliar volunteers during stressful and relaxing activities, we tested eighteen dogs under three conditions: no odour, stress odour and relaxed odour, with the order of test odours counterbalanced across dogs. When exposed to stress odour during session three, dogs were significantly less likely to approach a bowl placed at one of the three ambiguous locations (near-n

SUBMITTER: Parr-Cortes Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11263577 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature