Factors influencing a hand-touch learning task outcome in the domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris)
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dog cognition research often requires dogs to meet initial screening and preliminary behavioural criteria to proceed with subsequent experimental task phases. Reasons for the excluded dogs’ inability to meet the criteria, especially in the absence of major stressors or procedural errors, remain uncertain, whether stemming from variations in cognitive capacities, reward motivation, or lack of specific experiences in dogs’ learning history. Our objective was to identify predictors of failure in an owner-administered hand-touch learning task, with the aim of highlighting the characteristics of dogs more likely to succeed in this specific task and the potential sampling bias this success may introduce to the final study populations in similar cognitive studies. A total of 150 pure-bred dogs performed a hand-touch learning task with their owners, using food rewards as a reinforcer. The task consisted of different phases, each necessitating the dog to fulfill specific criteria before progressing to the subsequent phase. Failure was defined as the inability to meet the specified task criteria after three days of attempting the task. Binomial logistic regression was used to evaluate the probability of failure, incorporating dogs’ demographic characteristics, training history, reward responsiveness, and impulsivity scores, along with factors specifying owners’ previous experiences with dogs as independent variables. indicated a higher likelihood of task failure associated with advancing age, lower food responsiveness scores, being a non-sporting dog, receiving non-food rewards in previous trainings, lack of familiarity with the hand-touch behaviour, along with a lack of dog training knowledge and a history of owning fewer dogs by the owner. While findings are specific to the hand-touch training and may not generalize to other types of canine cognitive tasks or broader contexts, they highlight potential selection biases in similar cognitive research, where certain groups of dogs may demonstrate a higher likelihood of success, and thus, be disproportionately represented. This possibility warrants further exploration across a broader range of cognitive tasks and contexts. • Older and less food responsive dogs are more likely to fail in the hand-touch learning task. • Dogs without relevant training experiences are more likely to fail in the hand-touch task. • Owners dog training knowledge and their prior experience with dogs may impact dogs’ learning outcome in the hand-touch task. • Canine cognition research employing similar tasks should consider potential biases favoring the performance of highly reward-motivated or experienced dogs.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it