Can Dogs Limbo? Dogs' Perception of Affordances for Negotiating an Opening.

Very little research has focused on canines' understanding of their own size, and their ability to apply this understanding to their surroundings. The current study tests domestic dogs' judgment of their body size in relation to a changing environment in two novel experimental situations: when encountering an opening of decreasing height (Study 1) and when negotiating an opening when carrying a stick in their mouth (Study 2). We hypothesized that if dogs understand their own body size, they will accurately judge when an opening is too small for their body to fit through, showing longer latencies to approach the smaller openings and adjusting their body appropriately to get through-although this judgment may not extend to when their body size is effectively increased. In line with these hypotheses, we found that the latency for subjects to reach an aperture they could easily fit through was significantly shorter than to one which was almost too small to fit through. We also found that the order of subjects' adjustments to negotiate an aperture was invariant across individuals, indicating that dogs' perception of affordances to fit through an aperture is action-scaled. Preliminary results suggest that dogs' approach behavior is different when a horizontal appendage is introduced, but that dogs were able to alter their behavior with experience. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that dogs understand their own body size and the affordances of their changing environment.

Eye Tracking Lateralized Spatial Associations in Early Childhood.

This experiment tests the age at which left-to-right spatial associations found in infancy shift to culture-specific spatial biases in later childhood, for both numerical and non-numerical information. Children ages 1 to 5 years (N=320) were tested within an eye-tracking paradigm which required passive viewing of a video portraying a spatial transposition. In this video, an item was hidden in a vertical set of locations, which were then surreptitiously rotated 90°. There were several conditions, which varied in the degree to which the locations were presented alongside ordinal (numerical, alphabetical) or non-ordinal (nonsense label) information. After transposition, a narrator prompted the child to visually search the array. The amount of time spent fixating in a location consistent with a left-to-right mapping or a right-to-left mapping was measured to gauge the degree and laterality of spatial associations. Overall, children looked more towards locations consistent with a left-to-right mapping. This effect fluctuated with age, dipping as children entered toddlerhood, increasing in 3- and 4-year-olds, and then disappearing at age 5. The ordinal nature of the stimuli (e.g., numerical or non-numerical) did not influence the laterality of the spatial associations. A follow-up experiment confirms that, like older preschoolers, adults (N=66) also exhibit no spontaneous left-to-right mapping bias in this paradigm, with no fluctuation as a result of condition. These data support the presence of a decrease in left-to-right processing around the age of two, as children recede from infantile spatial biases and progress to exhibiting culture-specific spatial biases in early childhood.