Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Many organisms encounter situations where they lackinformation required to successfully exploit a resource. Onestable strategy that may be particularly useful is a win-stay-lose-shift strategy, in which an individual continues toperform a behavior that has proven fruitful in the recent pastor otherwise shifts to a new behavior. Here we investigatewhether domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) use a win-stay-lose-shift strategy utilizing data from 326 puppies and 323 adultdogs on a repeated object-choice task. We found a significanteffect of previous-trial success on dogs’ subsequent searchpatterns. Specifically, dogs were more likely to shift searchlocations if they were unsuccessful on the previous trial.These findings suggest that puppies and adult dogs win-stay-lose-shift.