If dogs can not see color, predict what should happen when the student flashes the white light.?

Question

A student was told that dogs can not see color. From everything she had read she believed that this was most likely true but wanted to test it anyway. She developed an experiment using three dogs to test her hypothesis. Her Experiment involved using two identical looking flashlights, one of which had a red lens and the other had a white lens. Her test involved 2 weeks of flashing the red lens flash light and then giving her dogs a treat. After 2 weeks of conditioning she knew that is she flashed the red light her dogs would expect food and salivate. To test this theory she randomly selected either red or white light, flashed it and observed if the dogs salivated or not.

Answer 1

Dogs can see color, actually. Check out this website: http://www.uwsp.edu/psych/dog/LA/DrP4.htm
Dogs are red-green color blind, which is a whole lot different than having black and white vision. The red light won't look red to them, but it will look different than the white light. So, when the student flashes the red light, the dogs will salivate, but when she flashes the white light, nothing will happen. That's assuming that the dogs were paying attention to the light in the first place, and not going off some other body signal. They also might be responding to a change in her voice, her body language, or some other subtle clue.
Hope this helps!

Answer 2

There are a lot of variables to consider in this experiment. First, at the previous person said, color-blind doesn't mean totally color blind. Also, covering the light with film will change the intensity of the light. The white light might be brighter than the one with red film to a color-blind dog.

To perform the test better, there are cards with colors on it at the same intensity. These are used to test color blindness in people. You can use these cards with a white flashlight to differentiate between the different colors. White might still be more intense, though, unless you got a grey card at the same intensity as the colored slides.