Persistence in learned responses: A comparison of Animal Assisted Intervention and pet dogs

Abstract

Dogs participating in Animal Assisted Interventions (AAI) are prime candidates to assess how increased interactionwith people modulates canine behavior. The aim of this work was to compare the behavior of AAI and pet dogs onthree tasks following the same pattern: a) an acquisition phase in which dogs were reinforced for emitting a specificresponse and b) an extinction phase in which it was no longer reinforced. We evaluated 26 dogs (13 participating inAAI and 13 living as pets) on learning two sociocognitive tasks (gazing and object choice) and a non-social one(problem solving). As clients do not always respond properly to their communicative interactions, AAI dogs often needto persevere in their communicative responses during their typical activities. Therefore, we hypothesized that AAI dogswould be more persistent than pet dogs, particularly during the extinction phases of the tests. Although no significantmain effects of group were observed during the extinction phase of the gazing test, only pet dogs significantlydecreased the time spent gazing at the experimenter during this phase, which indicates they gazed less as trials wenton. In the object choice task, no differences between these groups were observed. Finally, in the problem solving task,AAI dogs persisted significantly more picking up bones even when the apparatus was empty and also spent more timeinteracting with it during extinction trials than pet dogs. Besides preexisting behavioral characteristics, the higherexposure to people as well as not always being immediately reinforced during their work, may affect AAI dogs?persistence on some cognitive tasks. However, factors such as training levels and interaction with the experimenterduring the task modulate this response. A deeper understanding about AAI dogs will shed light over the effects ofincreased social experience on dogs? cognition and is particularly relevant given the popularity of AAIs in the recentyears.