The role of life experience in affecting persistence: A comparative study between free-ranging dogs, pet dogs and captive pack dogs.

Martina Lazzaroni,Larissa Darc,Friederike Range,Sarah Marshall-Pescini,Lara Bernasconi,Akshay Rao,Maria Holtsch,Roberta Massimei,Carolyn J Walsh

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0214806

Abstract

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.

Highlights

Problem solving performance is a cognitive trait which is an accepted measure of general cognitive ability [1] and has been observed to variably influence subjects’ fitness [2,3,4,5]
Analysing whether the subjects manipulated the ball or not, we found significant difference between Free-ranging dogs (FRd) and Pet dogs (Pd) (GLM: z = 4.02, p < 0.001) and FRd and WSC dogs (WSCd) (GLM: z = 3.6, p < 0.001), while no differences were observed between Pd and WSCd (GLM: z = 0.05, p = 0.9), Fig 4
We found that pet dogs and captive dogs were more manipulative and persistent than free-ranging dogs

Summary

Introduction

Problem solving performance is a cognitive trait which is an accepted measure of general cognitive ability [1] and has been observed to variably influence subjects’ fitness [2,3,4,5]. The study found that free-ranging dogs were less persistent (i.e. they interacted with the apparatus for a shorter duration) than pet dogs This is in line with what was observed in other species where captive animals outperform their wild counterparts [20,21,22]. As neophobia (defined as ’the avoidance of an object solely because it has never been experienced and is dissimilar from what has been experienced in the individual’s past’ [58]) has often been shown to negatively correlate with persistence ([12, 14, 59] but see [60]), we tested both free-ranging dogs and pet dogs with a plastic bottle–a familiar object that all subjects have considerable experience with This allowed us to assess the potentially different effect of neophobia on persistence in the two dog populations. Since the population of free-ranging dogs that we tested has been observed to live around a wide variety of human artefacts, we expected neither free-ranging dogs nor pets to act differently when tested with the ball compared to the plastic bottle

Ethical statement

Results

Discussion