Going back to "basics": Harlow's learning set task with wolves and dogs.
Associative learning
Dogs
Domestication
Learning set
Reversal learning
Serial learning
Wolves
Journal
Learning & behavior
ISSN: 1543-4508
Titre abrégé: Learn Behav
Pays: United States
ID NLM: 101155056
Informations de publication
Date de publication:
23 May 2024
23 May 2024
Historique:
accepted:
30
04
2024
medline:
23
5
2024
pubmed:
23
5
2024
entrez:
23
5
2024
Statut:
aheadofprint
Résumé
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.
Identifiants
pubmed: 38780876
doi: 10.3758/s13420-024-00631-6
pii: 10.3758/s13420-024-00631-6
doi:
Types de publication
Journal Article
Langues
eng
Sous-ensembles de citation
IM
Informations de copyright
© 2024. The Author(s).
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