Detector dog training shows companion-dogs rapidly remember the what and where of instinctively significant scents

Abstract

All of the companion dogs demonstrated that they were capable of rapid training to remember ‘the what’ of trained‑for scents of evolutionary significance. In training, all the dogs made the cognitive transition of realising the tug‑o‑war‑towelling‑incentive‑toy TOWIT they were chasing and fetching had a scent and when they could no longer see their TOWTIT they scent‑searched for it instead. The next day all the dogs remembered those scents that they had been trained‑for. The dogs remembered the where of their trained‑for scents by rapidly finding them. When the dogs identified their trained‑for scents from the distractors, they went to the boxes presumably because they thought that in a box was where it should be. Four of the six dogs rapidly identified their trained‑for scents from the distractors showing that they had remembered what and where. The other two dogs knew the game (training) was to find a scent what and that the scent should be in a cardboard box where, but did not understand the implied (but impossible to state) rule, that it had to be that particular instinctively significant scent rather than any of the others. Both their training and testing involved a lot of walking and running around so we feel that our dogs showed procedural memory as well as declarative memory. Our evidence showed that like humans our dogs demonstrated a sense of self. They did this by displaying higher order cognition with (1) their range of sophisticated thinking skills, such as understanding the training (concept acquisition) searching for their TOWTITs (systematic decision making), distinguishing their trained‑for scents from the distractors (rule usage) and (2) by demonstrating procedural memory which is a critical component for sense of self.The first‑night‑effect FNE, o?en used to deliberately disturb the sleep in humans and dogs’ did not affect the sleep of our dogs in this study. This negative finding, was aAributed to the naturally robust structure of dogs’ polyphasic, short sleep‑wake cycles, their behaviourally stable habitat of being at home in close proximity to their owners and that the study measured full 8 h recordings.Sleep in dogs may not be as important for learning as believed because previously the small number of neurologically focused studies did not test dogs’ major sense of smell and may have shown other behavioural design misunderstandings. The training methods employed in this study can provide considerable enrichment in the lives of both companion dogs and their owners. For many of our dogs their training provided a catalyst for them to go on to further scent training and the use of their considerable cognitive abilities.