Volume 171, October 2015, Pages 146–151
Highlights
- •
- We compared the effect of two training methods on behavioural consistency.
- •
- Dogs had to perform trained actions on verbal cue in different contexts.
- •
- Do as I do (DAID) was more effective than shaping (SHA) within our time limit.
- •
- Training time to behavioural consistency was shorter for dogs trained with DAID.
- •
- More dogs trained with DAID performed the actions on cue in a different context.
Abstract
Dog
training methods traditionally rely on individual learning (mainly
operant conditioning). Yet dogs are adept in acquiring information
socially and are able to imitate humans. Dogs’ predisposition to learn
socially has been recently introduced in dog training with the Do as I
do method. With this method dogs first learn to match their behaviour to
a small set of actions displayed by a human demonstrator on command ‘Do
it!’ and later are able to generalise this rule to use it to learn
novel actions. In the present study, we compare the effectiveness of the
Do as I do method with that of shaping/clicker training, a method that
relies on individual learning, for teaching dogs two different kinds of
actions: a body movement and an object-related action. As measures of
effectiveness, we use the number of dog-trainer pairs experienced with
either method, that succeed in obtaining five performances in a row of
the predetermined action within 30 min and the latency to the fifth
performance. Additionally, we assess the effect of these training
methods on dogs’ memory of the trained action and its verbal cue in
different contexts. Our results show that the Do as I do method is more
effective than shaping/clicker training to teach dogs object-related
actions within a relatively short time and suggest that this method
might be also applied for training body-movements. Importantly, the use
of social learning enhances dogs’ memory and generalisation of the
learned action and its verbal cue.
Keywords
- Dog;
- Dog training;
- Do as I do;
- Social learning;
- Generalisation;
- Memory
