Müller Corsin A, Riemer Stefanie, Range Friederike, Huber Ludwig
Messerli Research Institute, University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Medical University of Vienna, University of Vienna, Veterinärplatz 1, Vienna, 1210, Austria,
Anim Cogn. 2014 May;17(3):821-5. doi: 10.1007/s10071-013-0709-9. Epub 2013 Nov 20.
A wealth of comparative data has been accumulated over the past decades on how animals acquire and use information about the physical world. Domestic dogs have typically performed comparably poorly in physical cognition tasks, though in a recent study Kundey et al. (Anim Cogn 13:497-505, 2010) challenged this view and concluded that dogs understand that objects cannot pass through solid barriers. However, the eight subjects in the study of Kundey et al. may have solved the task with the help of perceptual cues, which had not been controlled for. Here, we tested dogs with a similar task that excluded these cues. In addition, unlike the set-up of Kundey et al., our set-up allowed the subjects to observe the effect of the solid barrier. Nevertheless, all 28 subjects failed to solve this task spontaneously and showed no evidence of learning across 50 trials. Our results therefore call into question the earlier suggestion that dogs have, or can acquire, an understanding of the solidity principle.
在过去几十年里，已经积累了大量关于动物如何获取和利用有关物理世界信息的比较数据。在物理认知任务中，家犬的表现通常相对较差，不过在最近一项研究中，昆迪等人（《动物认知》，第13卷，第497 - 505页，2010年）对这一观点提出了质疑，并得出结论称狗明白物体不能穿过固体障碍物。然而，昆迪等人研究中的八只受试犬可能是借助未得到控制的感知线索来完成任务的。在此，我们用一项类似的任务对狗进行测试，该任务排除了这些线索。此外，与昆迪等人的实验设置不同，我们的设置允许受试犬观察固体障碍物的影响。尽管如此，所有28只受试犬都未能自发解决这个任务，并且在50次试验中都没有表现出学习的迹象。因此，我们的研究结果对之前认为狗拥有或能够习得对固体性原则的理解这一观点提出了质疑。
