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UC Davis: "Explosive- and drug-sniffing dogs? performance is affected by their handlers? beliefs"

By John Wesley Hall, Jr.

Explosive- and drug-sniffing dogs’ performance is affected by their handlers’ beliefs / UC Davis study finds detection dogs may exhibit the “Clever Hans” effect from the UC Davis Health System (Feb. 1, 2011): The performance of drug- and explosives-sniffing dog/handler teams is affected by human handlers’ beliefs, possibly in response to subtle, unintentional handler cues, a study by researchers at UC Davis has found. The study, published in the January issue of the journal Animal Cognition, found that detection-dog/handler teams erroneously “alerted,” or identified a scent, when there was no scent present more than 200 times — particularly when the handler believed that there was scent present...continue to full post

Full post as published by Fourth Amendment on February 05, 2011 (boomark / email).