Determining Hearing Thresholds in Dogs Using the Staircase Method.

There is a growing interest in performing playback experiments to understand which acoustical cues trigger specific behavioral/emotional responses in dogs. However, very limited studies have focused their attention on more basic aspects of hearing such as sensitivity, i.e.

Sound Localization Ability in Dogs.

The minimum audible angle (MAA), defined as the smallest detectable difference between the azimuths of two identical sources of sound, is a standard measure of spatial auditory acuity in animals. Few studies have explored the MAA of dogs, using methods that do not allow potential improvement throughout the assessment, and with a very small number of dog(s) assessed. To overcome these limits, we adopted a staircase method on 10 dogs, using a two-forced choice procedure with two sound sources, testing angles of separation from 60° to 1°.