Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Dogs are recognized for their social reasoning and skillful interactions with humans, but their understanding of causal rela-tionships and the underlying principles (e.g., temporal priority) are under-explored. To address this gap, we adapted a taskused with children to investigate how pet dogs use temporal sequences of events. Dogs (N=22) watched an experimenterperform a sequence of two actions on a puzzle box: i) one action before a treat was dispensed from the box (causal action)and ii) the other action after the treat appeared (non-causal action). Each action was temporally equidistant from the treat.After observing the sequence, dogs interacted with the box. Preliminary results indicate that over the course of five trialsdogs preferred interacting with the causal action and were more likely to investigate it first, compared to the non-causalaction on trial one. Results will be discussed in a comparative context of observational and experiential learning.