Going back to "basics": Harlow's learning set task with wolves and dogs.

ABSTRACT: To survive and reproduce, animals need to behave adaptively by adjusting their behavior to their environment, with learning facilitating some of these processes. Dogs have become a go-to model species in comparative cognition studies, making our understanding of their learning skills paramount at multiple levels, not only with regards to basic research on their cognitive skills and the effects of domestication, but also with applied purposes such as training. In order to tackle these issues, we tested similarly raised wolves and dogs in a serial learning task inspired by Harlow's "learning set." In Phase 1, different pairs of objects were presented to the animals, one of which was baited while the other was not. Both species' performance gradually improved with each new set of objects, sho

SUBMITTER: Rivas-Blanco D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11628440 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature