Precedence of global or local elements in visual perception of dogs.

In processing a visual scene, humans encode the global aspects before proceeding to a more fine-grained analysis of visual inputs. In a previous study, we showed that dogs give priority to the global level in processing hierarchical visual stimuli. Notwithstanding, the dogs were also able to rely solely on differences at the local level to discriminate between stimuli. Following these results, we set out to investigate how the use of a global discrimination criterion affects the performance of dogs in a hierarchical stimuli discrimination task. Discriminating a known hierarchical stimulus on the exclusive base of a global or a local criterion does not result in different learning speed. Our results do not support the 'novel global discrimination task' as a viable procedure for the assessment of global and local processing by family dogs.