Do Dogs (Canis familiaris) Understand Invisible Displacement?

Abstract

Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) perform above chance on invisible displacement tasks despite showing few other signs of possessing the necessary representational abilities. Four experiments investigated how dogs find an object that has been hidden in 1 of 3 opaque boxes. Dogs passed the task under a variety of control conditions, but only if the device used to displace the object ended up adjacent to the target box after the displacement. These results suggest that the search behavior of dogs was guided by simple associative rules rather than mental representation of the object's past trajectory. In contrast, Experiment 5 found that on the same task, 18-and 24-month-old children showed no disparity between trials in which the displacement device was adjacent or nonadjacent to the target box.The invisible displacement task was originally conceived by Piaget (1937Piaget ( /1954) as a measure of toddlers' transition to Stage 6 in his theory of object permanence. In the classic task, the subject sees the experimenter hide a desired object under a displacement device, typically a small opaque container. The experimenter slides the displacement device under one of several hiding boxes, surreptitiously deposits the object beneath this box, and shows the subject that the displacement device is now empty. To find the object, the subject cannot rely on perceptual information alone but rather must infer the object's location by mentally representing its past trajectory (e.g., Call, 2001). The task is thus thought to provide evidence of representational thought: the ability to entertain representations of objects or events that cannot be directly perceived.As such, Piaget's invisible displacement task continues to feature strongly in both developmental and comparative research and theory. In Perner's (1991) theory of representational development, for example, passing the invisible displacement task is one of several markers of the emergence of a capacity for secondary representation. Perner suggests that prior to the middle of their 2nd year, infants have access only to primary representations; that is, they maintain a direct model of reality that is continually updated with incoming perceptual information. Passing the invisible displacement task indicates that the child can go beyond a single updating model to entertain multiple models of the world. That is, the child is able to hold in mind a model of the current world (primary representation: displacement device empty) as well as a model of the past world (secondary representation: displacement device with object under large box). By collating these two models the child can infer the likely location of the surreptitiously displaced object. Children typically begin passing the invisible displacement task at approximately 18 -24 months of age (e.g., Kramer, Hill, & Cohen, 1975;Piaget, 1937Piaget, /1954. Perner (1991) argues that several other abilities emerging in the 2nd year, such as mirror self-recognition and pretend play, also involve secondary representations. At le...

Dog-logic: inferential reasoning in a two-way choice task and its restricted use

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Female but not male dogs respond to a size constancy violation

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Object permanence in dogs: Invisible displacement in a rotation task

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