CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Many lines of evidence show differences between the communicative skills and social responses of dogs kept in shelters for long periods of time compared to pet dogs. The purpose of this work is to investigate whether there are also differences between these groups in a non-social problem-solving task consisting of dislodging nine plastic bones placed in a bowl in order to obtain the food hidden underneath. The procedure comprised three phases: reinforcement, extinction, and reacquisition. In study 1, a second goal was to study whether, in the course of resolving said task, the dogs exhibit different social responses in the presence of a stranger that remained seated near the apparatus in a passive attitude throughout the test. Results demonstrated that pet dogs spent longer time interacting with the apparatus throughout the three phases, which probably evidences greater persistence of reward seeking behavior, compared to shelter dogs. This difference may relate to the fact that pet dogs have been more frequently exposed to partial reinforcement processes during their everyday life and have thus increased their resistance to extinction. On the other hand, during the extinction phase when no food was left, shelter dogs remained near for a longer time and gazed more at the person than pet dogs. This might indicate that the person was a stronger stimulus for shelter dogs as they are more deprived of social contact with people in their everyday life, which proves how the experiences during ontogeny shape the relationship between dogs and humans. The second study showed that pet dogs spent more time interacting with the apparatus compared to shelter dogs, even in the absence of the person. These results indicate that pet dogs are more persistent in the reward searching response while shelter dogs have a higher social motivation.