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

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.

物体操作中的持续行为始终与问题解决的成功率密切相关，且已知在个体层面会受到生活经历的影响。在问题解决的研究语境中，生活经历的差异尚未得到充分探讨，且现有研究大多仅聚焦于野生动物与圈养动物之间的对比。犬类是极具研究价值的实验对象，因为不同种群的犬类拥有迥异的生活经历。本项比较研究中，我们向三类生活经历差异显著的犬群展示了带有无法获取食物的新颖物体（即不可完成任务），以此考察受试犬的持续操作行为。这三类犬群分别为：摩洛哥的自由放养村落犬、维也纳的伴侣犬，以及群居圈养的狼科学中心（Wolf Science Center-WSC）犬只。实验结果显示，伴侣犬与圈养犬（WSC）的操作意愿与持续行为均强于自由放养村落犬。自由放养村落犬的低持续行为并非源于对物体接触不足——它们日常所处的环境中会频繁接触各类人类人造物品。相反，我们认为相较于自由放养村落犬，圈养犬与伴侣犬表现出更强的持续行为，或许源于它们拥有更多由人类介导的物体交互经验。这类经验能够为受试对象提供由社会引导的物体操作与交互体验，进而提升它们参与此类任务的动机。