Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Past work has found that dogs perceive and respond to certain characteristics of items, specifically an object's familiarity and quality when making choices. However, in the real world, these characteristics don't exist in isolation, and understanding the interaction between familiarity and valuation as they relate to object choice can provide insight into how dogs make decisions. We aimed to explore how item familiarity and quality intersect to form dogs’ preferences for one food over another in a two-alternative forced choice task. We found that dogs' choices were driven only by the quality of the food item, and the familiarity of the item did not impact choice behavior. Determining what motivates dogs and contributes to their preferences has implications for understanding decision-making at large, as well as for advancing canine science.