Multisensory mental representation of objects in typical and Gifted Word Learner dogs.

ABSTRACT: Little research has been conducted on dogs' (Canis familiaris) ability to integrate information obtained through different sensory modalities during object discrimination and recognition tasks. Such a process would indicate the formation of multisensory mental representations. In Experiment 1, we tested the ability of 3 Gifted Word Learner (GWL) dogs that can rapidly learn the verbal labels of toys, and 10 Typical (T) dogs to discriminate an object recently associated with a reward, from distractor objects, under light and dark conditions. While the success rate did not differ between the two groups and conditions, a detailed behavioral analysis showed that all dogs searched for longer and sniffed more in the dark. This suggests that, when possible, dogs relied mostly on vision, and switch

SUBMITTER: Dror S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9652232 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature