Distraction, learning and performance in dogs

Distractions that lead to performance deficits in working dogs can be life-threatening to the dog, its handler, and others. To reduce the impact of extraneous stimuli, distractors that are likely to occur in the working environment can be incorporated into training. Yet, the impact that distraction training has on learning efficacy remains unclear. Similarly, whether dogs are able to generalise from their trained distractors to novel stimuli that they may face whilst working is unknown. Here, we investigated how training with an acoustic distractor impacts dogs’ capacity to learn and later perform a task in the presence of novel stimuli that vary in similarity to the trained distractor (a similar acoustic and a dissimilar light distractor). We found that dogs trained with a distractor learned the task less efficiently than dogs trained in silence, and did not perform the task more efficiently when subsequently tested in the presence of the novel sound or light distractors. Interestingly, the similar auditory stimulus impaired task performance more than the dissimilar light stimulus in dogs from both training conditions. While dogs trained with the acoustic distractor habituated faster to the novel sound distractor than dogs trained without a distractor, this trend was not significant. Our findings highlight potentially negative effects of distraction training on learning, and provide limited support that it improves task performance in dynamic working environments.