Establishment of equivalent stimuli classes in dogs

• Grant number: 13/17236-7
• Support type: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Effective date (Start): March 01, 2014
• Effective date (End): March 31, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology - Experimental Psychology
• Principal researcher: Camila Domeniconi
• Grantee: Luiza Augusta de Oliveira Costa Langsdorff
• Home Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Some researchers consider that the failure in consistently recording stimuli equivalence with non verbal subjects may be related with procedures which, inadvertently, establish incoherent topography of stimulus control between subjects and experimenters, and they speculate that this coherency might be reached with intensive training and that equivalence is a basic process. . Considering recent records of accurate performances of dogs in auditory-visual matching to sample, responding by exclusion, emergent identity matching to sample, categorizations of visual stimuli, attention to social cues and energy to work, dogs seems to be ideal subjects to studies about equivalence that may need intensive training. The present study, to be conducted with two border collie dogs, aims to investigate if after intensive training of conditional auditory-visual relations between dictated names and objects and conditional visual-visual relations between objects, the emergency of symmetry, transitivity and reflexivity will be verified. After the learning criteria of teaching conditions is achieved, the equivalence tests will be conducted and repeated three times at the most or else until the verification of equivalence stimulus classes is reached.