Dissociating the effects of delay and interference on dog (Canis familiaris) working memory

Krichbaum, Sarah; Lazarowski, Lucia; Davila, Adam; Cox, Emma; Smith, Jordan G.; Katz, Jeffrey S.

doi:10.1007/s10071-021-01509-0

Cited by 10 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Previously, working memory has been defined as a cognitive skill enabling individuals to temporarily hold information in a state of increased accessibility (Cowan 2017 ). Cognitive tasks used in dogs to measure working memory typically include different versions of delayed response tasks (Bray et al 2020a ; Fiset et al 2003 ; Krichbaum et al 2021 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of the dog executive function scale (DEFS) for adult dogs

2022

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Executive functions (EFs) are cognitive processes that are used to effortfully self-regulate behaviour and might be important for dogs’ success in working and pet roles. Currently, studies are assessing dogs’ EF skills through often laborious cognitive measures, leading to small sample sizes and lacking measures of reliability. A complementary method is needed. The aim of this study was to develop a dog executive function scale (DEFS) for adult dogs. Focus groups were held with people working with dogs professionally to refine a pool of items describing dog behaviours related to EF. A survey was distributed online to a convenience sample of N = 714 owners of adult dogs. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis identified six distinguishable factors named behavioural flexibility, motor inhibition, attention towards owner, instruction following, delay inhibition and working memory. These factors appear similar to factors identified in human EF scales. Working dogs exhibit higher EF scores on the DEFS than non-working dogs. Dogs sourced from breeders exhibited higher DEFS scores than dogs sourced from shelters, and the amount of training received positively correlated with dogs’ DEFS scores. The DEFS requires further validation with cognitive measures. The DEFS could then be used by researchers to complement assessment of dogs’ EF skills through cognitive measures or assess dogs’ EF skills in large samples.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of the dog executive function scale (DEFS) for adult dogs

2022

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“…Based on Fiset et al’s (2003) finding that dogs could remember the position of a displaced stimulus for up to 240 s when not controlling for the use of nonmnemonic strategies, we thought it reasonable to predict that the dogs in the current study would remain above chance at 90 s in the regular study condition but that the forgetting function would appear steeper in the nonmnemonic control condition. In the absence of similar SWM tasks, our prediction of WM duration (assessed in the nonmnemonic control condition) was based on previous studies that implemented the matching-to-sample task to assess WM in dogs and found that performance dropped to chance levels between 60 and 90 s for auditory (Kuśmierek & Kowalska, 2002) and odor stimuli (Krichbaum et al, in press). Although it was surprising that dogs remained above chance on delays of up to 90 s in the nonmnemonic control condition, it is possible that the increased difficulty of the conditional discrimination or the lack of power due to small sample sizes in the previous matching-to-sample studies contributed to the shorter duration (eight and five dogs, respectively).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Previous studies that assessed the duration of dog SWM using the VDT found that dogs performed above chance for delays up to 240 s; therefore, we predicted that dogs would remain above chance for the highest delay tested (90 s) on the regular study condition (Fiset et al, 2003). In contrast, we hypothesized that dogs would not remain above chance for the highest delay tested in the nonmnemonic control condition based on previous studies with dogs that found a steep decrease in performance between 60 and 90 s on delayed matching-to-sample tasks (Krichbaum et al, in press; Kuśmierek & Kowalska, 2002).…”

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confidence: 99%

Controlling for dogs’ (Canis familiaris) use of nonmnemonic strategies in a spatial working memory task.

Krichbaum

Smith

Lazarowski

et al. 2021

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cogniti

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Short assessments of spatial working memory (SWM) in dogs are becoming popular evaluations of canine aging and individual differences. In a typical SWM task, an experimenter hides a reward inside of a bucket at a specific stimulus position while the dog watches. Then, following a varying delay interval, the dog is released to choose a bucket. The longest delay at which the dog can successfully choose the bucket containing the reward is considered to reflect the dog's SWM duration. Although past studies were informative, the tasks often lacked a valid measure of SWM due to dogs' ability to use nonmnemonic strategies, such as body orientation or sustained attention, to successfully solve these tasks without relying on working memory mechanisms. Therefore, we designed the first study to assess the internal validity of these tasks by directly comparing dogs' performance on two experimental conditions. We found that dogs performed worse in a control condition in which nonmnemonic strategies were eliminated compared with a typical SWM task condition. In addition, our results indicate a strong relationship between the percentage of delay time that a dog spends orienting its head or body to the correct bucket and performance in a typical SWM task. These findings were the first to show a difference in SWM performance when dogs' use of nonmnemonic strategies was controlled and stress the importance of considering the internal validity of these tasks if used to examine SWM in future work.

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“…The subjects in this study were six domestic dogs, similar to the sample size of previous studies of same-different conceptualization or MTS that have included four to five dogs, two dolphins, one parrot, and two to nine rhesus monkeys (Katz et al, 2002; Krichbaum et al, 2021; Lazarowski et al, 2021; Mercado et al, 2000; Pepperberg, 1987; Pietrzykowska & Sołtysik, 1975; Wright et al, 1990). All subjects were pet dogs of various age, breed, and sex with various training histories, and all were trained and tested in the Neural and Cognitive Plasticity laboratory on campus at the University at Buffalo.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Same-different conceptualization in dogs (Canis familiaris).

Scagel¹,

Mercado²

2023

Journal of Comparative Psychology

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concept formation was once thought to be a uniquely human ability. An increasing variety of nonhuman species have demonstrated aspects of this ability, however, suggesting that conceptualization is a widely shared aspect of cognition. The capacity to form a concept of same-different, in particular, has now been shown in pigeons, primates, bottlenose dolphins, sea lions, and more. Traditional methods of studying abstract concept formation include matching-to-sample (MTS), same/different (S/D), and relational-matching-to-sample tasks, tasks that typically require animals to discriminate sets of planar images. Some of these methods may actually test familiarity, memory, associative learning, or other phenomena rather than a concept of same-different. In the current study, we tested same-different concept formation in domestic dogs using a variation on the S/D task that required subjects to discriminate sets of three-dimensional objects. This method avoids some pitfalls of matching-to-sample and S/D tasks that use two-dimensional images and thousands of training trials. Dogs were able to learn to classify sets of objects as “same” and “different” and proved to be able to immediately transfer this ability to novel sets, including sets of only two objects. Domestic dogs are promising subjects for future studies of same-different conceptualization due to their widespread availability and willingness to work cooperatively with humans.

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Dissociating the effects of delay and interference on dog (Canis familiaris) working memory

Cited by 10 publications

References 21 publications

Development of the dog executive function scale (DEFS) for adult dogs

Development of the dog executive function scale (DEFS) for adult dogs

Controlling for dogs’ (Canis familiaris) use of nonmnemonic strategies in a spatial working memory task.

Same-different conceptualization in dogs (Canis familiaris).

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