Animals can assign novel odours to a known category

Abstract

The ability to identify a novel stimulus as a member of a known category allows an organism torespond appropriately towards it. Categorisation is thus a fundamental component of cognition andan essential tool for processing and responding to unknown stimuli. Therefore, one might expectto observe it throughout the animal kingdom and across sensory domains. There is much evidenceof visual categorisation in non-human animals, but we currently know little about this process inother modalities. In this experiment, we investigated categorisation in the olfactory domain. Dogswere trained to discriminate between 40 odours; the presence or absence of accelerants formed thecategorical rule. Those in the experimental group were rewarded for responding to substrates withaccelerants (either burnt or un-burnt) and inhibit responses to the same substrates (either burnt or unburnt)without accelerants (S+ counterbalanced). The pseudocategory control group was trained onthe same stimuli without the categorical rule. The experimental group learned the discrimination andanimals were able to generalise to novel stimuli from the same category. None of the control animalswere able to learn the discrimination within the maximum number of trials. This study provides the firstevidence that non-human animals can learn to categorise non-biologically relevant odour information