ASD-similar social behaviour scores affect stimulus generalization in family dogs

TL;DR

Dogs with ASD-like social behavior show similar generalization difficulties as humans with autism, suggesting a useful animal model for studying ASD.

Contribution

The study demonstrates that dogs with ASD-like traits exhibit impaired generalization abilities analogous to those in humans with ASD.

Findings

Dogs with lower F1 scores showed significant associations with generalization task performance.

ASD-like dogs exhibited sensitivity to minor changes in stimuli during testing.

Improvement in task performance was observed during repeated testing sessions.

Abstract

Generalization, the tendency to respond in the same way to different but similar stimuli, is one of the main cognitive abilities that make category formation possible and thus is a prerequisite for efficiency in learning. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience pervasive difficulty with producing generalized responses across materials, people, places, and contexts. Increasing evidence suggests that “ASD-like” social impairments appear endogenously and spontaneously in family dogs providing a high-validity model for understanding the phenotypic expression of human ASD. The present study aims to further investigate the dog model of ASD by the approach of searching for analogues in dogs showing “ASD-like” social impairments of cognitive phenomena in humans specific to ASD, specifically impairments of generalization abilities. We have tested 18 family dogs with formerly established “ASD-like” behaviour scores (F1, F2, F3) in a generalization task involving three conditions (size, colour and texture). We found a significant association between F1 scores and test performance as well as improvement during testing sessions. Our study provides further support for the notion that dogs with lower social competence—similarly to humans with ASD—exhibit attentional and perceptual abnormalities, such as being sensitive to minor changes to a non-adaptive extent.

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