Dogs And Object Permeance Essay

Dogs and Object Permanence: Extra Credit In the article, Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Object Permanence in Dogs, Thomas R. Zentall and Kristina F. Pattison explain a new theory. Many scientists have purposed the idea that dogs learn object permanence just as well as most babies do. Both of their characteristics are very similar within the experiments they ran to compare the two. Further testing was done to fully access the ability of dogs and object permeance. The results of the tests were astounding. Object permeance is when one has developed the ability to understand even if an object has disappeared from sight, it is still there. Visible displacement is the easiest way to test if the child, or dog, has knowledge of object permeance. In this test, “… a desired object is placed in one of several identical opaque containers and the child is allowed to search for the hidden or displaced object,” (Zentall & Pattison, 2016, 357). Typically, a child will be able to do so by the time they are twelve months old. (Piaget, 1954) Dogs are recently discovered to have similar qualities of object permeance as human babies do. Using an invisible displacement task, children and
Within this study, a container which held a toy inside was moved behind a series of other containers which did not contain the toy. The container with the toy was then placed insight, except it did not have the toy inside. A dog would search for the toy in the container the one which held the toy disappeared behind first. In conclusion, it was not determined that dogs have object permanence because cues (such as the person that takes away the container) could hinder this particular experiment. This proved to be true when the test was done so with the person disappearing and then reappearing with the empty container. The dogs failed the test more often than not. Therefore, making all of the findings