2023-09-14 11:21:16
Wolf Group – FLICKR
MADRID, 14 Sep. (EUROPA PRESS) –
In a study with several wolves and dogs, both animals performed better in the search for hidden food if they had observed how a person hid it.
This suggests that they remembered where the food was and did not rely solely on smell to find it, and is evidence of observational spatial memory, according to what the authors publish in the open access journal ‘PLOS ONE’.
Many species transmit important information through social learning, in which one individual learns by observing or interacting with another.
Previous research has suggested that wolves and dogs — which were domesticated from wolves — are capable of a form of social learning known as observational spatial memory, in which one individual can remember where another hid a stash of food and steal it. However, there is still much to learn about these abilities and their possible differences between wolves and dogs.
To shed new light, Sebastian Vetter of the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Austria, and his colleagues conducted a study with 9 timber wolves and 8 mongrel dogs living at the Wolf Scientific Center in Ernsbrunn, Austria.
They tested each animal’s ability to find 4, 6, or 8 food caches, either after seeing a human hiding them or without the animal seeing the cache.
The researchers found that both dogs and wolves found more of the top 5 food caches more quickly. and with less distance traveled if they saw how the food was hidden than if they did not see the hiding place. This suggests that the animals did not only use odor to find food and supports the hypothesis that both types of animals are capable of observational spatial memory.
Whether they saw the hidden food or not, the wolves outperformed the dogs in finding the hiding places. The researchers suggest that this performance difference may not be due to a different observational spatial memory capacity, but rather to differences in other traits, such as persistence and food-related motivation.
The authors add that, “although domestication likely affected dogs’ willingness to adapt to humans, the results of the current study contribute with previous findings suggesting that cognitive abilities do not differ much between dogs and wolves.”
#Evidence #observational #spatial #memory #wolves #dogs