In the current study, we investigated the question of whether dogs were sensitive to the information that they themselves had or had not acquired. For this purpose, we conducted three consecutive experiments in which dogs had to find a reward that was hidden behind one of two V-shaped fences with a gap at the point of the V. This setup allowed us to distinguish between selecting one of the fences by walking around it and seeking additional information by checking through the gap in the fence. We varied whether dogs had visual access to the baiting procedure or not. In addition, we manipulated the type and quality of reward as well as the time delay between baiting and choosing to analyze if the dogs’ searching behavior was affected. Our results were partly consistent with the findings of Call (Animal Cognition, 13 (5), 689–700, 2010) with great apes, on whose findings we based our experiments. We found that dogs checked more often through the corner of the V-shaped fence when they had not seen where the reward was hidden. Interestingly, dogs rewarded with toys selected the correct fence more often than dogs rewarded with food. Even though dogs’ performance was not affected by the food quality condition, dogs were significantly faster in fetching a high-quality food reward as opposed to a low-quality food reward. When testing whether forgetting and checking would increase as a function of delay, we found that although dogs slightly decreased in their success in finding the food when time delays were longer, they were not more likely to check before choosing. We show that – similar to apes – dogs seek additional information in uncertain situations, but their behavior in uncertain situations is less flexible compared to great apes.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.3758/s13420-018-0367-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Virtual reality (VR) represents a key technology of the 21st century, attracting substantial interest from a wide range of scientific disciplines. With regard to clinical neuropsychology, a multitude of new VR applications are being developed to overcome the limitations of classical paradigms. Consequently, researchers increasingly face the challenge of systematically evaluating the characteristics and quality of VR applications to design the optimal paradigm for their specific research question and study population. However, the multifaceted character of contemporary VR is not adequately captured by the traditional quality criteria (ie, objectivity, reliability, validity), highlighting the need for an extended paradigm evaluation framework. To address this gap, we propose a multidimensional evaluation framework for VR applications in clinical neuropsychology, summarized as an easy-to-use checklist (VR-Check). This framework rests on 10 main evaluation dimensions encompassing cognitive domain specificity, ecological relevance, technical feasibility, user feasibility, user motivation, task adaptability, performance quantification, immersive capacities, training feasibility, and predictable pitfalls. We show how VR-Check enables systematic and comparative paradigm optimization by illustrating its application in an exemplary research project on the assessment of spatial cognition and executive functions with immersive VR. This application furthermore demonstrates how the framework allows researchers to identify across-domain trade-offs, makes deliberate design decisions explicit, and optimizes the allocation of study resources. Complementing recent approaches to standardize clinical VR studies, the VR-Check framework enables systematic and project-specific paradigm optimization for behavioral and cognitive research in neuropsychology.

There has been a growing interest in the cognitive skills of domestic dogs, but most current knowledge about dogs' understanding of their environment is limited to the visual or auditory modality. Although it is well known that dogs have an excellent olfactory sense and that they rely on olfaction heavily when exploring the environment or recognizing individuals, it remains unclear whether dogs perceive odors as representing specific objects. In the current study, we examined this aspect of dogs' perception of the world. Dogs were presented with a violation-of-expectation paradigm in which they could track the odor trail of one target (Target A), but at the end of the trail, they found another target (Target B). We explored (a) what dogs expect when they smell the trail of an object, (b) how they search for an object, and (c) how their educational background influences their ability to find a hidden object, by comparing family dogs and working dogs that had passed exams for police or rescue dogs. We found that all subjects showed a flexible searching behavior, with the working dogs being more effective but the family dogs learning to be effective over trials. In the first trial, dogs showed measurable signs of "surprise" (i.e., further searching for Target A) when they found Target B, which did not correspond to the odor of Target A from the trail. We conclude that dogs represent what they smell and search flexibly, which is independent from their educational background. (PsycINFO Database Record