Cognitive Dog: Invisible Displacement

The Cognitive Dog class tonight was good. There are only a few classes left. :(
I just figured out tonight that there is another high school student taking the class; a homeschooled freshman from Colorado. I didn't read all of the hello notices at the beginning of the discussion board and missed hers, I guess. Oops.

Tonight we talked about some of the cognitive experiments on dogs. When I got home I tried to recreate one. The original experiment is testing to see if dogs understand invisible displacement. The dog sees a treat being put in some object, the object goes behind a screen or into a bucket and leaves the treat there. The dog sees the object come back out and is shown that it is empty. In the initial experiments dogs seemed to do better than chance on the task. However, the researchers eventually figured out that the dogs were going by where the object was put down and would go to the bucket closest to the object.

I set up something similar with the pups, a very makeshift uncontrolled experiment. 2 bowls, dog sitting in front of me. First test was easy, I dropped treat in bowl showed them my hand and they went right for the bowl when released. (Both dogs worked separately, same results)
Second test. I used a shell to conceal the treat. I let the dog sniff the treat in the shell and then dropped it into the bowl. Good on that one too. I held the shell in my hand after each trial. One problem I had was that the treat made a noise when it hit the bottom which could have clued them in. Third test. Same as the second test, treat in shell, shell goes in bowl, comes out without treat, they get to smell shell. Except this time I put the shell in the other bowl and touched it to the bottom and showed them there was still no treat in the shell. Massive failure. So what I'm taking away from this is that they were paying attention to what bowl I touched last.
Fourth test. I made it easier this time and dropped the treat in with my hand and then went to touch the other bowl. The first few trials Tom did not get it and then he caught on he had to watch the bowl he saw the treat fall into. I tried the third trial again and he was slightly more successful but not very.

I had Tom on-leash in the front yard this afternoon and Opal was a good 15 yards away. She started stalking him from that distance and then when she got halfway to him she charged over. Oh, Opie. He held her eye contact the whole time. Warding her off? (which didn't work by the way)