Dogs Miss Things When Focused on Getting Treats

Dogs might experience a type of blindness when offered a treat, a new study has found.

It has long been known that humans can experience "inattentional blindness" when they are highly fixated on a task. The phenomenon refers to when a person may not notice other things in their environment, while being highly concentrated on something else.

Researchers from the Department of Psychological Sciences, at Auburn University in Alabama, set out to discover whether dogs experienced the same thing. They discovered that when treats are involved, they do. Their findings are published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science.

To reach their findings, researchers divided a selection of dogs into groups, balanced by sex and personality. Traits like temperament were balanced as they could potentially influence the dogs' ability to experience inattentional blindness, the study reported.

The dogs were then trained to run down a corridor during five trials. In some trials, the dogs were rewarded with a treat at the end of the run. The other group was not rewarded after running down the corridor.

The next step was to place an object in a doorway halfway down the corridor. They then recorded each dog's reaction to the object.

They found that dogs expecting a reward at the end of the corridor were more likely to ignore the object placed in the doorway, suggesting that the dog was highly fixated on receiving the treat.

The study concludes that dogs do, in fact, experience a degree of inattentional blindness similar to humans, when there is a reward involved.

"These findings provide the first evidence of inattentional blindness in dogs, and have important implications for dog behavior with particular relevance for the training and performance of working dogs," the authors wrote in the study.

It is already widely known that dogs are motivated by treats and food. But this is the first study to assess how they can play a role in this phenomenon. It is the first study to assess inattentional blindness in dogs as a whole, and only the second to examine it in a non-human species, the authors write.

A person's sensory system is often overloaded with information. Inattentional blindness is the body's way of processing the overload, by selecting information to pay attention to, according to the researchers.

It is likely that the same process happens to dogs, when they are faced with many different tasks at once. However more research will be needed to discover more.

These findings do not just reveal important insights into inattentional blindness across non-human species, but should also help reform the training and socialization practices of dogs.

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