Guide dogs' navigation after a single journey: A descriptive study of path reproduction, homing, shortcut and detour

Guide dogs are working dogs that follow the verbal instructions of owners with severe visual impairments, leading them through the environment and toward goals such as a subway entrance (“Find the subway” instruction). During this process, guide dogs incidentally familiarize themselves with their en...

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Autores principales: Gaunet, Florence, Besse, Sandie
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6634399/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31310614
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0219816
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author Gaunet, Florence
Besse, Sandie
author_facet Gaunet, Florence
Besse, Sandie
author_sort Gaunet, Florence
collection PubMed
description Guide dogs are working dogs that follow the verbal instructions of owners with severe visual impairments, leading them through the environment and toward goals such as a subway entrance (“Find the subway” instruction). During this process, guide dogs incidentally familiarize themselves with their environment. As such, they provide a unique animal model for studying wayfinding abilities in the canine species. In the present descriptive study, 23 skilled guide dogs travelled along a path once and were subsequently tested in a navigation task, with a blindfolded guide dog instructor as the handler. Dogs had difficulty reproducing the path (only 30.43% of the dogs succeeded) and returning (homing) along the previously travelled path (43.47% of the dogs succeeded). However, 80% of them successfully took a shortcut, and 86.95% a detour. This is the first description of the wayfinding abilities of dogs after a single discrete exploration of the path (incidental learning) in systematic experimental conditions. Errors, initiatives and success rates showed that dogs were able to keep track of the goal if the path was short, but errors increased with longer paths, suggesting segmented integration of path characteristics process, as demonstrated in humans. Additionally, errors on homing and detouring, both vital wayfinding tasks, were correlated, suggesting an effect of experience. Initiatives taken by the dogs further suggest flexibility of the spatial representation elaborated. Interestingly, we also found that homing was the only task to benefit from severe visual disability and regular exposure to new journeys, suggesting that these two factors influence the most important wayfinding task. This study therefore highlights qualitative and quantitative wayfinding abilities in the dog species, as well as the factors that account for them, after a single path exploration accompanied by natural ongoing motivation. In the wake of the discovery that dogs are sensitive to the magnetic field, our results provide the basis for developing systematic wayfinding tests for guide dogs.
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spelling pubmed-66343992019-07-25 Guide dogs' navigation after a single journey: A descriptive study of path reproduction, homing, shortcut and detour Gaunet, Florence Besse, Sandie PLoS One Research Article Guide dogs are working dogs that follow the verbal instructions of owners with severe visual impairments, leading them through the environment and toward goals such as a subway entrance (“Find the subway” instruction). During this process, guide dogs incidentally familiarize themselves with their environment. As such, they provide a unique animal model for studying wayfinding abilities in the canine species. In the present descriptive study, 23 skilled guide dogs travelled along a path once and were subsequently tested in a navigation task, with a blindfolded guide dog instructor as the handler. Dogs had difficulty reproducing the path (only 30.43% of the dogs succeeded) and returning (homing) along the previously travelled path (43.47% of the dogs succeeded). However, 80% of them successfully took a shortcut, and 86.95% a detour. This is the first description of the wayfinding abilities of dogs after a single discrete exploration of the path (incidental learning) in systematic experimental conditions. Errors, initiatives and success rates showed that dogs were able to keep track of the goal if the path was short, but errors increased with longer paths, suggesting segmented integration of path characteristics process, as demonstrated in humans. Additionally, errors on homing and detouring, both vital wayfinding tasks, were correlated, suggesting an effect of experience. Initiatives taken by the dogs further suggest flexibility of the spatial representation elaborated. Interestingly, we also found that homing was the only task to benefit from severe visual disability and regular exposure to new journeys, suggesting that these two factors influence the most important wayfinding task. This study therefore highlights qualitative and quantitative wayfinding abilities in the dog species, as well as the factors that account for them, after a single path exploration accompanied by natural ongoing motivation. In the wake of the discovery that dogs are sensitive to the magnetic field, our results provide the basis for developing systematic wayfinding tests for guide dogs. Public Library of Science 2019-07-16 /pmc/articles/PMC6634399/ /pubmed/31310614 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0219816 Text en © 2019 Gaunet, Besse http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Gaunet, Florence
Besse, Sandie
Guide dogs' navigation after a single journey: A descriptive study of path reproduction, homing, shortcut and detour
title Guide dogs' navigation after a single journey: A descriptive study of path reproduction, homing, shortcut and detour
title_full Guide dogs' navigation after a single journey: A descriptive study of path reproduction, homing, shortcut and detour
title_fullStr Guide dogs' navigation after a single journey: A descriptive study of path reproduction, homing, shortcut and detour
title_full_unstemmed Guide dogs' navigation after a single journey: A descriptive study of path reproduction, homing, shortcut and detour
title_short Guide dogs' navigation after a single journey: A descriptive study of path reproduction, homing, shortcut and detour
title_sort guide dogs' navigation after a single journey: a descriptive study of path reproduction, homing, shortcut and detour
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6634399/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31310614
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0219816
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