Stimulus Control of Odorant Concentration: Pilot Study of Generalization and Discrimination of Odor Concentration in Canines

摘要

Dogs are deployed worldwide for detection tasks, but little is known about how they spontaneously generalize between concentration variations of their trained odor. This study found that dogs spontaneously generalized within a 10-fold concentration range lower than the training stimulus. Further, dogs could be trained to discriminate between concentrations within that 10-fold range. However, discrimination training did not affect dogs’ spontaneous generalization to the odor concentration unless discrimination training occurred in compound with generalization testing, suggesting that relative stimulus control of the target and non-target concentrations might be important in determining whether dogs will respond.