Dogs' excellent sense of smell is well known, whether it's for looking for people or for contraband. However, the question of how dogs understand what they perceive with their sense of smell is largely unexplored. In one study, scientists explored this question and found evidence that dogs create a "mental representation" of the target when they follow a scent trail. In other words, they have an expectation of what they will find at the end of a trail.
In total, the researchers tested 48 dogs, 25 of which had been trained with the police or a search and rescue team, and 23 of them were family dogs with no special training. The dogs first underwent a pre-test, in which two toys were found for each dog that he or she wanted to pick up. In the test itself, each dog underwent four trials in which he or she followed a scent trail pulled with one of the two toys. At the end of the trail, the dogs either found the toy the track was made with (the normal state) or the dog found the other toy (the surprise state). Half of the dogs in the first round got the normal state and the other half got the surprise state. The behavior of the dogs was filmed during all test drives.
Through experience from other studies, it was assumed that the surprise would be measurable in the sense that the dogs would behave differently in the surprising state than they would in the normal state. In fact, quite a few dogs showed interesting behavior, especially in the first round of the surprise state called 'hesitancy':although they had clearly noticed the toy, they continued to search by scent, probably for the toy that had been used to trace the scent. lay. However, this “surprise effect” disappeared in the following test drives. This could be because no matter what toys they found, the dogs were rewarded by playing games, or because the room still smelled like the toys from the previous test runs, even though they had been cleaned.
After all, according to the review, the results of the first round of testing indicate that dogs have a mental representation of the target object when following a scent, meaning they have a concrete expectation of the target. “The comparison between working dogs and family dogs was also interesting,” the researcher added. While the police and rescue dogs were expected to indeed retrieve the items faster than the family dogs in the first round, the two groups retrieved the toys just as quickly within four rounds. Further studies should help clarify the precise relationship between odor perception, search behavior and cognition.
