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The More the Merrier:Dogs can Assess Quantities in Food-Choice Tasks


Affiliations
1 Department of Biological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata, Mohanpur 741 246, India
 

Animals in their natural environment often face situa-tions where it may be advantageous for them to be able to make decisions based on numerical or quantity discrimination. Canids like pet dogs, wolves and coy-otes have been known to have a preliminary sense of number. We tested 303 unique free-ranging dogs for seven food-choice tasks, skewed in terms of stimulus: olfactory, visual and reward obtained. The dogs pri-marily used olfactory cues in the decision-making process, rather than visual cues, to discriminate between different quantities in a context-dependent manner.

Keywords

Food-Choice Task, Free-Ranging Dogs, Numerical Cognition, Quantity Discrimination, Stimulus.
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  • The More the Merrier:Dogs can Assess Quantities in Food-Choice Tasks

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Authors

Arunita Banerjee
Department of Biological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata, Mohanpur 741 246, India
Anindita Bhadra
Department of Biological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata, Mohanpur 741 246, India

Abstract


Animals in their natural environment often face situa-tions where it may be advantageous for them to be able to make decisions based on numerical or quantity discrimination. Canids like pet dogs, wolves and coy-otes have been known to have a preliminary sense of number. We tested 303 unique free-ranging dogs for seven food-choice tasks, skewed in terms of stimulus: olfactory, visual and reward obtained. The dogs pri-marily used olfactory cues in the decision-making process, rather than visual cues, to discriminate between different quantities in a context-dependent manner.

Keywords


Food-Choice Task, Free-Ranging Dogs, Numerical Cognition, Quantity Discrimination, Stimulus.

References





DOI: https://doi.org/10.18520/cs%2Fv117%2Fi6%2F1095-1100