Wolf Science Center, Domestication Lab, Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology, University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, Austria.
Comparative Cognition, Messerli Research Institute, University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, Austria.
PLoS One. 2019 Apr 17;14(4):e0214806. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0214806. eCollection 2019.
Persistence in object manipulation has been consistently associated with problem-solving success and it is known to be affected, at the individual level, by life experience. Differences in life experiences are particularly poorly studied in the problem-solving context and mainly refer to the comparison between wild and captive animals. Dogs represent interesting study subjects, since dog populations differ widely in their life experiences. In this comparative study we investigated subjects' persistence when presenting a novel object containing food that could not be accessed (impossible task) to three dog populations with very diverse life experiences: free-ranging village dogs (in Morocco), pet dogs (in Vienna) and captive pack living dogs (Wolf Science Center-WSC). We found that pet dogs and captive dogs (WSC) were more manipulative and persistent than free-ranging dogs. The low persistence of free ranging-dogs is unlikely the effect of a lack of exposure to objects, since they are confronted with many human' artefacts in their environment daily. Instead, we suggest that the higher persistence of captive dogs and pet dogs in comparison to free-ranging dogs might be due to their increased experience of human-mediated object interaction. This provides subjects with a socially guided experience in manipulating and interacting with objects increasing their motivation to engage in such tasks.
在物体操作方面的坚持性一直与解决问题的成功相关，并且已知它会受到个体生活经验的影响。在解决问题的背景下，生活经验的差异研究得特别少，主要是指野生动物和圈养动物之间的比较。狗是一个有趣的研究对象，因为狗种群在生活经历方面存在很大差异。在这项比较研究中，我们调查了三个具有非常不同生活经验的狗种群（摩洛哥的自由放养村庄狗、维也纳的宠物狗和圈养群居狗）在面对含有无法获取食物的新物体（不可能完成的任务）时的坚持性。我们发现，宠物狗和圈养群居狗（WSC）比自由放养狗更具操纵性和持久性。自由放养狗的持久性低不太可能是由于缺乏对物体的接触，因为它们每天在环境中都会遇到许多人类的人工制品。相反，我们认为，与自由放养狗相比，圈养狗和宠物狗的持久性更高，可能是由于它们增加了人类介导的物体交互体验。这为他们提供了一个在操纵和与物体互动方面受到社会指导的经验，从而增加了他们从事此类任务的动机。
