Camera Traps & Operant Conditioning

I spent 10-weeks doing a camera trap study looking at the activity patterns, habitat use and dietary preference of nocturnal carnivores in South Africa. This is a sample of some of the images captured during the study.

This was a psychological study into ‘The Visual Sorting Strategy of the Domestic Dog’ that I conducted as part of my MSc in Animal Behaviour. Previous scientific studies have shown that pigeons and squirrels rely on colour as the key factor aiding discrimination. I firstly conditioned the dog to choose the blue star with dots (BSD) as the positive stimulus and the orange circle with hash (OCH) was conditioned as the negative stimulus. An olfactory test was done to ensure that the subject was not using smell to locate the food rewards. The fact that whippets are reliant on sight rather than scent when hunting is also reassuring. Once conditioned to select the BSD prototype, I presented ‘one-away’ shapes that shared two elements with the original positive prototype stimulus (BSD); this was called family-resemblance (Leaver et al., 2007). This particular dog was most responsive to shape, although family resemblance was also secondly considered; colour was the least regarded element (it is a common misconception to assume that dogs, or mammals in general, lack colour vision).