Elsevier

Behavioural Processes

Volume 140, July 2017, Pages 69-73
Behavioural Processes

Sustained attention to the owner is enhanced in dogs trained for animal assisted interventions

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2017.03.024Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Dogs’ attention to their owner was assessed at baseline and in a selective test.

  • Pet dogs and dogs trained for agility or Assisted Intervention were studied (N = 96).

  • Gazes to owner were longest for AAI dogs and shortest for agility in baseline.

  • In selective test, gaze length was longer in AAI then pets, intermediate for agility.

  • Sustained attention to owners is enhanced in AAI trained dogs in situations of varying complexity.

Abstract

Adaptation in human societies requires dogs to pay attention to socially relevant human beings, in contexts that may greatly vary in social complexity. In turn, such selective attention may depend on the dog’s training and involvement in specific activities. Therefore, we recruited untrained pet dogs (N = 32), dogs trained for agility (N = 32) and for animal assisted interventions (N = 32) to investigate differences in attention to the owner in relation to the dogs’ training/working experience. Average gaze length and frequency of gaze shifting towards the owner were measured in a ‘baseline attention test’, where dogs were exposed to the owner walking in and out of the experimental room and in a ‘selective attention test’, where the owner’s movements were mirrored by an unfamiliar figurant. In baseline, gazes to the owner by assistance dogs were longer than gazes by untrained dogs, which were longer than gazes by agility dogs. The latter shifted gaze to the owner more frequently than assistance and untrained dogs. In the selective attention test, assistance dogs showed longer and less frequent gazes towards the owner than untrained dogs, with intermediate values for agility dogs. Correlations were found for gaze length between the baseline and selective attention test for untrained and assistance dogs, but not for agility dogs. Therefore, dogs trained for Animal Assisted Interventions express enhanced sustained attention to their owners, and the lack of similar effects in agility dogs suggests that involvement in specific activities is associated with large differences in the patterns of attention paid by dogs to their handler/owner.

Introduction

Adaptation to life in social groups implies the ability to pay sustained attention to other individuals. For dogs, this often means being able to look at their human companions, in contexts which may greatly vary in social complexity. The functional role of dogs’ attention to humans is indirectly supported by a large number of evidences, indicating how dogs can make use of human visual signals to guide their behaviour (Kaminski and Nitzschner, 2013), learn by observing human actions (Kubinyi et al., 2009), make decisions upon their own behaviour based on human’s attentive states (Gácsi et al., 2004, Virányi et al., 2004). Moreover, situations such as exposition to potential threats (Merola et al., 2012) or unsolvable problems (D’Aniello et al., 2015, Marshall-Pescini et al., 2009) elicit dogs’ alternated looking between the source of concern and the owner, suggesting dogs may look for support from their human companions when facing a challenging situation. A close affective relationship is believed to be at the basis of dogs’ proneness to look at humans within their social group. Indeed, high attention levels are selectively paid by dogs to their owners (Horn et al., 2013, Mongillo et al., 2010), especially if the latter are the main caretakers and engage in a high number of activities with their dog (Horn et al., 2013). However, a close relationship is not sufficient to guarantee high levels of attention in any situation. In fact, contextual circumstances have a profound impact on attention patterns, and when the setting is complex and rich in stimuli, attention paid by dogs towards their owners may drop to trivial levels (Mongillo et al., 2014).

Among the factors that may impact on dogs’ patterns of attention to their owners across different contexts, one highly relevant is the dog’s training history. A handful of studies looked at the patterns of owner directed gazing behaviour by dogs who underwent different types of training, aimed at leisure (e.g. obedience, Mongillo et al., 2016) as well as working activities, such as guide for the blind (Gaunet, 2008), water rescue (D’Aniello et al., 2015), agility and search-and-rescue (Marshall-Pescini et al., 2009). The bottom line of these studies is that different training/working experiences exert different effects on patterns of interspecific selective attention, reflecting the peculiar characteristics of the contexts and of the tasks that dogs are trained to perform. For instance, dogs trained for agility, which encompasses working exclusively with their handler showed more frequent gaze shifting and longer gazes specifically directed at their owner than pets did, while lower attention levels were found in search-and-rescue dogs, who need to attend to their owner’s signals but also focus on looking for a stranger (Marshall-Pescini et al., 2009). Proposed mechanisms linking different training regimes to variation in owner directed attention include a change in the owners’ effectiveness as either a source of specific signals/instructions or as a source of help/support in uncertain situations (D’Aniello et al., 2015, Marshall-Pescini et al., 2009, Mongillo et al., 2016).

Among the many types of existing dog working activities and relative training regimes, Animal Assisted Interventions (AAI) represent an ideal candidate for investigating the relative importance of the two abovementioned mechanisms in mediating the effects of training/working activities on dogs’ attention to the owner. AAI are a heterogeneous group of activities, which share the characteristic of encompassing the presence of and/or the interaction with people; however, there is a wide diversity among AAI as for the number and category of people involved, which may range from children to the elderly, from healthy to the physically or psychiatrically disabled. Such variability represents a potential challenge for the dog, and training for this type of work focuses on enhancing the dogs’ ability to being able to cope with the diverse and complex social situations possibly occurring in AAI (Mongillo et al., 2015). AAI training is therefore likely to have an effect on the interspecific attention pattern expressed by dogs, that must be able to concentrate on their handler amongst other human distractors, while monitoring the movements and actions of the latter. Moreover, the dogs’ ability to work in AAI is generally believed to depend on a close relationship with the handler, whose role is not just to contribute to the success of the intervention, but also to provide support and guidance to the dog in the problematic situations that may occur. Indeed, for most of the AAI organizations worldwide, accreditation for working in AAI is not merely based on evaluation of the performance of the dog, but on performance of the dog-handler dyad and the quality of their relationship. As the closeness of the relationship is so crucial in the context of AAI, handlers are in most cases also the owners and caretakers of the dogs they work with.

The aim of this study was to investigate the relative contribution of factors, related to training/working experience, that are known to or believed to impact on dog’s attention to the owner, namely a close dog-human relationship, an acquired disposition to look at the owner to receive signals/instructions, and an acquired reliance on the owner as a source of help/support in uncertain situations. To this aims, three group of dogs were recruited, namely (1) a group of pet dogs, in which the close dog-owner relationship should represent the main determinant of attention patterns, (2) a group of agility trained dogs, who, in addition to a close relationship with their owner (who is their handler), are trained to focus on the latter to detect signals in context that do not normally imply uncertain or unpredictable situations, thus not requiring the owners’ support, and (3) a group of AAI trained dogs, whose activity implies a close relationship with the owner (who is their handler), a training to focus to the handler’s signals, but also exposition to other social partners, which may require a share of dog’s attention, and, at the same time, could be a source of concern, promoting dogs’ looking at their owner as source of support.

In the context of this study, we considered gazing patterns as the main behavioural expressions of attention. Indeed, attention can be characterised by two functionally distinct processes: the attention-getting process, which determines if an individual will turn towards a certain stimulus and relates to the frequency with which the subject looks at that stimulus; and attention-holding processes which determines how long an individual maintains its orientation and relates to the duration of gazes towards the stimulus (Cohen, 1972). Thus, we measured such parameters in the context of two tests, based on a procedure originally standardized by our group (Mongillo et al., 2010). This easily performed procedure relies on the mild stress represented by the separation of the dog from its owner to elicit a spontaneous orientation behaviour. Dogs underwent a ‘baseline attention test’, in which we characterised dogs’ patterns of gazing to the sole owner, and a ‘selective attention test’, which included the presence of an unfamiliar figurant, allowing us to determine how gazing patterns would be modified in a more complex social context.

Section snippets

Subjects

The study involved privately owned dogs, whose owners were recruited on a voluntary basis through advertisements in pet supply stores, veterinary clinics, dog training schools and the campus of the School of Agronomy and Veterinary Medicine of the University of Padua. Three types of dogs were recruited for this study, based on their training experience: dogs who did not receive any formal training (NT), dogs who completed an agility training course with a qualified trainer (AG), and dogs who

Baseline attention test

Table 1 reports the results of the GEE indicating the effect of Target, Condition, and Training and their interactions on gazing variables in the Baseline Attention test. For all experimental groups, dogs’ gazes at the owner were longer than gazes at the environment (Fig. 1). However, the patterns of dog’s gazing to the owner depended on the training received by the dog: gazes to the owner by AA dogs were longer than gazes by NT dogs, which, in turn, were longer than gazes by AG dogs. The

Discussion

The main finding of this study was that dogs trained for AAI maintain their orientation towards their owner/handler (hereafter to referred to as ‘owner’) for longer bouts than pet dogs do; this difference was found in both a baseline condition, in which dogs were exposed to their owner alone walking in and out of the experimental room, and in a more complex condition, in which an unfamiliar figurant was introduced as a social distractor. Conversely, dogs trained for a non-social activity

Conclusions

In this study, we showed that sustained selective attention to the owner is enhanced in dogs trained for AAI, in conditions of varying social complexity. In view of the characteristics of the AAI, and of the lack of a corresponding effect in dogs trained for agility, we suggest that reliance on the owner support in situations of unease may be responsible for such result, although the hypothesis will need further confirmation. Regardless of the mechanisms involved, the findings of this study

Ethical declaration

This study was conducted in compliance with the relevant Ethical requirements of the University of Padua, of the Italian state and of the European Union.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the owners who participated in the study. We are very grateful to the students Lavinia Eddy and Emmanuele Baro for helping with experiments and to Dr. Carlo Poltronieri for his technical assistance. The study was funded by the University of Padua and by the Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale delle Venezie (Legnaro, Padova, Italy). Dr. Elisa Pitteri was supported by a PhD grant funded by the University of Padova.

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