Inattentional blindness in dogs

Abstract

Inattentional blindness occurs when an individual's attention is highly focused on a task, producing a failure to notice other stimuli in the environment. The current study aimed to assess whether dogs demonstrate inattentional blindness. We divided a cohort of dogs into experimental (n = 12) and control groups (n = 12), balanced by sex and aspects of temperament that could potentially influence inattentional blindness. Dogs were initially trained to run down an empty corridor for five consecutive trials. From trial 6–10, the experimental group was rewarded at the end of the corridor in order to condition an expectation of reward and induce inattentional blindness, while the control group continued to be unrewarded. On trials 11 and 12, a novel object was placed in a side opening halfway down the corridor for all dogs, and dogs’ responses to the object were scored. There were significantly fewer responses to the novel object by dogs in the experimental group compared to the control group, suggesting that dogs fail to attend to novel stimuli in the environment when expecting a reward. These findings provide the first evidence of inattentional blindness in dogs, and have important implications for dog behavior with particular relevance for the training and performance of working dogs.