Title (eng)
Going back to "basics": Harlow's learning set task with wolves and dogs
Abstract (eng)
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, showing that they "learnt to learn," but no differences were found between the species in their learning speed. In Phase 2, once subjects had learned the association between one of the objects and the food reward, the contingencies were reversed and the previously unrewarded object of the same pair was now rewarded. Dogs' performance in this task seemed to be better than wolves', albeit only when considering just the first session of each reversal, suggesting that the dogs might be more flexible than wolves. Further research (possibly with the aid of refined methods such as computer-based tasks) would help ascertain whether these differences between wolves and dogs are persistent across different learning tasks
Keywords (eng)
AnimalsDogsWolvesMaleFemaleSerial Learning PhysiologySpecies SpecificityRewardAssociation Learning PhysiologyLearning
Type (eng)
Language
[eng]
Persistent identifier
https://phaidra.vetmeduni.ac.at/o:3795
Is in series
Title (eng)
Learning & Behavior
Volume
52
Issue
4
ISSN
1543-4508
Issued
2024
Number of pages
15
Publication
Springer
Date issued
2024
Access rights (eng)
Rights statement (eng)
© 2024. The Author(s)
Content
Details
Object type
PDFDocument
Format
application/pdf
application/pdf
Created
20.01.2025 08:51:25
This object is in collection
Metadata
Veterinärmedizinische Universität Wien (Vetmeduni) | Veterinärplatz 1 | 1210 Wien - Österreich | T +43 1 25077-0 | Web: vetmeduni.ac.at