Science Fair Procedure?

Question

Okay, some know me cause I asked about this before. My question is "Is my dog red-green color blind?" I changed it a little bit but here it is:
1) Take black and white photos of an blue, yellow, green, and red paper. Compare shades.
2) Wrap each paper around a bowl until you have four bowls in dif. colors.
3) Fill each bowl with an equal amount of dog food.
4) Let the dog in so he can choose which bowl to eat from.
5) After he chooses, immediately record which one. He would choose the bowl closest shaded to his usual dog food bowl. His normal bowl is white. He would choose the paper closer to that, and if he can see green and red, then he would not choose them. Instead he would choose yellow (being closer to white than the others).
Does this sound good? If not, where and what can I improve? Please also give me your ideas for this. And also, if you don't want to help with the actual procedure, you could come up with a catchy name to put on my science fair board. Thanks everyone!

Answer 1

This could be a hard thing to demonstrate, because some dogs may use the sense of smell or other cues more than color when it comes to food. So first, if you want the experiment to work, you need to come up with an idea that prevents the dog from cheating by using smell or other cues.

Secondly, you are making an assumption that the dog actually notices the color of its bowl - it might not. It may relate eating to the location of the bowl and it would eat out of any bowl in the right location no matter what color - you could run an experiment to see if this is true. Here’s what to do:

While the dog is out of the room, you could put a red or green bowl in the usual location (with no food in it) and somewhere nearby put the white bowl (also with no food), and arrange them so the dog can see both bowls at the same time. Next, pretend you are feeding the dog by performing the same routines the dog is familiar with when feeding it – like opening a can of food, or scooping out dry food, but without actually putting any food in the bowls. Then, let the dog into the room with the bowls and see what happens. This would be a very good test. You could try it several times. If the dog goes for the white bowl no matter what location, it shows the dog is using color to recognize the bowls.

If the dog is does not recognize bowls by color, the next experiment will be much harder. You will have to train the dog, probably over the course of several days to recognize bowls of different colors by making a game out of it, and rewarding the dog when it gets the correct bowl. You could divide the dog’s meal into 8-10 servings, and repeat the test 8-10 times each meal by feeding the dog only one of the small servings each trial. Bowls would be arranged differently each time so the dog can’t use location to pick the bowl. You could use three bowls – yellow, red, and white, and always put the food reward in the red bowl. In the yellow and white bowls, put food in the bowl, but prevent the dog from getting the food by putting it in a small, perforated container, but make the container is too big for the dog to accidentally swallow. Then, in the red bowl, place a similar container, but leave the food outside the container so the dog can get to it. This will prevent the dog from using his nose to pick the correct bowl, because all bowls will smell the same. Now you have the problem of the dog recognizing which bowl has food that is not in a container, so you have to cover the containers in each bowl with a piece of paper the same color as the bowl so the dog has to remove the paper to see what’s underneath. This will reinforce color recognition. Keep running the experiment until the dog picks the red bowl consistently.

Now, the dog is trained to use a red bowl. So what happens if you run the experiment a few more times with only one red and one green bowl? If the hypothesis that dogs are red-green color blind is true, the dog will have no way of knowing which bowl has food in it by looking at the bowl. To run this experiment, place the food in a container in the green bowl, and food outside the container in the red bowl, then randomly shuffle them so location can’t be used to select the bowls. If the dog is color blind, it will be wrong about half the time because he will have to guess, and it’s like flipping a coin – about half the time he should select the correct bowl by guessing. If the dog is not colorblind, he will pick the red bowl nearly every time.

Expect an experiment like this to take a week or two to allow time to train the dog, and to repeat the experiment enough times to see results.