LEEC, Université Paris 13, Av. Jean-Baptiste Clément, 93430 Villetaneuse, France.
Anim Cogn. 2013 Jul;16(4):637-51. doi: 10.1007/s10071-013-0600-8. Epub 2013 Feb 14.
In most social interactions, an animal has to determine whether the other animal belongs to its own species. This perception may be visual and may involve several cognitive processes such as discrimination and categorization. Perceptual categorization is likely to be involved in species characterized by a great phenotypic diversity. As a consequence of intensive artificial selection, domestic dogs, Canis familiaris, present the largest phenotypic diversity among domestic mammals. The goal of our study was to determine whether dogs can discriminate any type of dog from other species and can group all dogs whatever their phenotypes within the same category. Nine pet dogs were successfully trained through instrumental conditioning using a clicker and food rewards to choose a rewarded image, S+, out of two images displayed on computer screens. The generalization step consisted in the presentation of a large sample of paired images of heads of dogs from different breeds and cross-breeds with those of other mammal species, included humans. A reversal phase followed the generalization step. Each of the nine subjects was able to group all the images of dogs within the same category. Thus, the dogs have the capacity of species discrimination despite their great phenotypic variability, based only on visual images of heads.
在大多数社交互动中，动物必须确定另一只动物是否属于自己的物种。这种感知可能是视觉上的，可能涉及到几种认知过程，如辨别和分类。感知分类可能涉及到表型多样性很大的物种。由于人工选择的强烈影响，家犬（Canis familiaris）是家养家畜中表型多样性最大的物种。我们的研究目的是确定狗是否能辨别任何一种狗与其他物种，并能将所有的狗，无论其表型如何，都归为同一类别。通过使用点击器和食物奖励对 9 只宠物狗进行了仪器训练，成功地让它们从计算机屏幕上显示的两个图像中选择一个有奖励的图像 S+。在概括阶段，展示了大量来自不同品种和杂交品种的狗的头部与其他哺乳动物物种（包括人类）的头部的配对图像。概括阶段之后是反转阶段。9 个被试中的每一个都能够将所有的狗的图像归为同一类别。因此，即使家犬的表型变化很大，仅基于头部的视觉图像，它们也有物种辨别能力。
