DISCRIMINATIVE TRAINING IN DOGS USING VISUAL STIMULI AND AUTOMATED PROCEDURE

Abstract

This paper presents two experiments that aimed to establish visual-visual conditional discriminations in dogs using an automated device. In Experiment I, conducted with 3 dogs, we tried to establish conditional discriminations using a procedure in which each sample-comparison relation was presented in one separated block of trials. In Experiment II, carried out with two dogs, we used an adapted version of a training path to establish discriminative repertoires (from simple to conditional discriminations) in people with special educational needs. In both experiments, subjects' performances were controlled by simple discriminations instead of conditional discriminations. Considering that dogs usually learn auditory-visual conditional discriminations, these results seem to represent a challenge for current analysis and, at same time, seem to give rise to doubts that could be experimentally investigated in the future. Keywords: simple discriminations, conditional discrimination, visual stimuli, automated device, dogs.