Going back to ‘basics’: Harlow’s learning set task with wolves and dogs

To survive and reproduce, animals need to behave adaptively by adjusting their behavior to their environment, with learning facilitating some of these processes. Despite the fact that dogs were the subject species for Pavlov’s original studies on learning, relatively little research has been done exploring dogs’ basic learning capabilities, and even fewer focused on the impact evolution may have had on this behavior. In order to investigate the effects of dog domestication on instrumental learning, we tested similarly-raised wolves and dogs in Harlow’s “learning set” task. In Experiment 1, several pairs of objects were presented to the animals, one of which was baited while the other was not. Both species’ performance gradually improved with each new set of objects, showing that they “learnt to learn” but no differences were found between the species in their learning speed. In Experiment 2 addressing reversal learning, once subjects had learned the association between one of the objects and the food reward, the contingencies were reversed and the previously unrewarded object of the same pair was now rewarded. Dogs’ performance in this task proved to be better than wolves’, albeit only when considering just the first session of each reversal, suggesting that either the dogs had not learned the previous association as well as the wolves or that dogs are more flexible than wolves. Further research (possibly with the aid of refined methods such as touchscreens) would help ascertain whether these differences between wolves and dogs are persistent across different learning tasks.