Effects of learning an increasing number of odors on olfactory learning, memory and generalization in detection dogs

Detection dogs continue to represent the most effective technology for the detection of explosives and other contraband. As the number of target odors and their variants that detection dogs are required to learn continues to increase, understanding the capacity for odor learning and the effects on performance of training on an increasing number of target odors on performance is critical. In the present study, we examined dogs’ ability to learn an increasing number of odor discriminations and the effects of learning new odors on the recall of previously trained odors. We trained dogs to respond to up to 40 odors in an odor discrimination task over the span of 16 months. Odors were trained in sets of 10 every three months. Recall of previously trained subsets was assessed at intervals of