“You can live without it dogThis sentence, attributed to German actor Heinz Rühmann, summarizes the feelings of millions of people who choose dogs as their companions. Scientists have been interested in this animal since ancient times. Which It has accompanied humans for more than 30,000 years. A group of Hungarian researchers tried to discover How dogs see the world. Their results were recently published in the journal ‘Ethology’.
“When we point to an object, the baby concentrates on the objectduring a dog often takes this movement as a directional signal“, emphasize the study’s authors, researchers from the Department of Ethology at Eötvös Loránd University, who have found explanations for this phenomenon.
“It appears that the difference (between babies and dogs) is not just in the way these animals see, but also in the way they actually see.” how do they think“. Even more: “For ‘smarter’ dogs, an object’s appearance is as important as its locationThis shows that Their information processing is more similar to humans“, points out scientists.
This phenomenon has previously been observed in dogs using a variety of behavioral tests, from simple to simple tests. antisocial learning up to imitationbut it had never been studied on its own,” explains Ivaylo Iotchev, first author of the study.
Previous research has not clarified whether dogs behave this way because they have poorer vision compared to primates, or whether it is actually some kind of disease. bias in information processingThus, the parameters of the space around them are more important to them than specific objects nearby.
Learning rate
Researchers ‘measured what they said they did’spatial bias(the phenomenon of interpreting information in relation to information) space, location wave distance A situation where the same information can be easily applied to an object in two behavioral tests involving 82 dogs.
In one task, dogs had to learn whether the reward was always on the right plate or the left plate in close to 50 trials, so they learned a location. In the other task, two types of plates were used, one round white and the other square black, and the dogs were always placed in the middle.
A dog was always given only one type of food, but each was consumed in a semi-random order. Learning was measured by how fast a dog ran to the correct food..
The results showed The animals learned faster when the reward was placed on the right or left, so they had to choose which way to go.. On the contrary, They had a hard time remembering whether the treat was on a round white plate or a black square plate..
‘Spatial bias’ measure explained How much faster do dogs learn about the location than the features of the object?. If the dogs already knew where the reward was, a more complex task followed because then the situation was reversed. In other words, if they had previously received the award on the right, it was placed on the left side in the new position, and if it was on the white plate, it was moved to the black plate.
Problem tasks
To find out whether there is spatial deviation sensory, cognitive anyone mixedwhat researchers need Detecting and measuring differences between dogs’ visual and cognitive abilities. This involved measuring how short the dog’s head was because this is linked to the length of the head. visual acuityand also measures its effectiveness in analysis. problem tasks.
“The visual abilities of dog breeds differ from each other, which is indirectly due to the shape of their heads. Dogs with shorter heads, scientifically known as brachycephaly, develop human-like eyesight.. “The structure of their retinas indicates sharper and more focused vision than in taller dogs,” explains study co-author Zsófia Bognár.
“This allowed us to use a measure of head shape (the so-called ‘cephalic index‘) as an approximate measure of the quality of vision in dogs. It is calculated by dividing the width of the skull by its length. The shorter the head, the larger the number,” adds Bognár.
to measure cognitive abilityThe dogs participated in various tests. “We tried them memory, attention skills And patience. “We found that dogs with better cognitive performance on the more difficult spatial bias task easily linked information to objects as well as places,” said Enikő Kubinyi, head of the pet research group at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
The study reveals that spatial bias is less in “smarter” dogs with better visual acuity. “Spatial bias in dogs is not just a sensory issue but also a way of thinking. We also discovered this ‘Smarter’ dogs persist in difficult learning situations and can overcome their biases“, concludes Iotchev.
Reference work: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eth.13423
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