Abstract
Detection dogs are commonly trained and tested under conditions in which the handler or the evaluator knows the true presence or absence of a target odor. Previous research has demonstrated that when handlers are deceived and led to believe that a target odor is present, more false alerts occur. However, many detection teams operate under unknown conditions, and it remains unclear how handler knowledge (or lack thereof) of odor presence/absence influences the dog's behavior. The aim of this study was to evaluate if knowing the number of hides placed influenced detection dog performance in an applied search environment. Professional (n = 20) and sport (n = 39) detection handler-dog teams were asked to search three separate areas (area 1 had one hide, area 2 had one hide, area 3 was blank). Handlers in the Unknown Group were not told any information on the number of hides whereas the Known Group were told there was a total of two hides in the three areas. The sport Unknown Group spent a longer duration (69.04 s) searching in area 3 compared to the sport Known Group (p = 0.004). Further, sport dogs in the Unknown group looked back to the handler more frequently. When a miss did occur, dogs of both sport and professional handlers showed an increase interest in the location of the target odor compared to a comparison location. Critically, however, there was no difference in false alerts between the Known Group and Unknown Group for sport or professional handlers. In a second experiment, fourteen professional, and thirty-nine sport teams from Experiment 1 conducted an additional search double-blind and an additional search single-blind. Both sport and professional-handler dog teams had statistically similar accuracy rate under single and double blind conditions. Overall, when handlers knew the number of hides, it led to significant changes in search behavior of the detection team but did not influence the overall false alert rates.
Highlights
Hits and misses were coded as mutually exclusive given only one target odor was present per search area, but false alerts could occur in addition to a hit or miss
The present results highlight that handler knowledge of the testing parameters influences search behavior, by increasing the search duration in a blank area and increasing the number of lookbacks to the handler by the sport dog
This did not directly translate to increased rates of false alerts when the number of target odors was Unknown compared to Known
Summary
Dogs have been utilized for a myriad of professional detection jobs for items such as explosive devices [1,2,3], narcotics [4, 5], semen stains for crime scenes [6], human odor [7,8,9,10,11], cancer [12,13,14], and conservation [15,16,17,18,19]. Failure to call an alert could result in a missed target source which can have detrimental implications for certain professional (e.g., explosive or live find search and rescue) detection dogs. Calling an alert when a dog is not showing the appropriate alert behavior or unintentionally cuing a dog to alert could lead to unnecessary emergency (e.g., explosive dog) or improper search (e.g., narcotics dog)
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