title: Context specificity of inhibitory control in dogs.
abstract: Across three experiments, we explored whether a dog's capacity for inhibitory control is stable or variable across decision-making contexts. In the social task, dogs were first exposed to the reputations of a stingy experimenter that never shared food and a generous experimenter who always shared food. In subsequent test trials, dogs were required to avoid approaching the stingy experimenter when this individual offered (but withheld) a higher-value reward than the generous experimenter did. In the A-not-B task, dogs were required to inhibit searching for food in a previously rewarded location after witnessing the food being moved from this location to a novel hiding place. In the cylinder task, dogs were required to resist approaching visible food directly (because it was behind a transparent barrier), in favor of a detour reaching response. Overall, dogs exhibited inhibitory control in all three tasks. However, individual scores were not correlated between tasks, suggesting that context has a large effect on dogs' behavior. This result mirrors studies of humans, which have highlighted intra-individual variation in inhibitory control as a function of the decision-making context. Lastly, we observed a correlation between a subject's age and performance on the cylinder task, corroborating previous observations of age-related decline in dogs' executive function.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA, ebray90@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Emily E
authors.initials: EE
authors.lastname: Bray
authors.forename: Evan L
authors.initials: EL
authors.lastname: MacLean
authors.forename: Brian A
authors.initials: BA
authors.lastname: Hare
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D003657:Decision Making; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D004285:Dogs / Q000523:psychology*; D056344:Executive Function; D005260:Female; D007266:Inhibition, Psychological; D008297:Male; D012201:Reward; D012919:Social Behavior