Poster 10

The purpose of this study was to examine preschoolers' ability to follow instructions in the presence or absence of a therapy dog while executing a variety of motor skills tasks. Two miniature poodles (1 neutered-male age 8 and 1 spayed-female age 6), trained extensively in agility and registered with Therapy Dogs International performed each of the motor skills tasks designed for this study. Fifteen tasks were divided into one of three general classifications; 1) Modeling Tasks the children were asked to emulate the behavior of a model, 2) Competition Tasks the children were asked to do the task faster than a competitor, 3) Tandem Tasks the children were asked to do the tasks as the same time as a co-performer. A total of 11 preschool children from an integrated classroom (6 Identified and 5 Typical, 3 were girls and 8 were boys, age 3 to 5 years) were randomly assigned to perform five tasks of each general classification alone, with a human, with a therapy dog, and with a stuffed dog that was similar in size and appearance to the live therapy dog. Two independent raters rated each child's adherence to instructions (inter-rater reliability = .99) on a 7 point scale. Nearly all of the effects in this study were significant (p < .05) but the most interesting effect was the interaction that revealed that in the Modeling Tasks the preschoolers adhered better to the instructions when the therapy dog was present relative to the stuffed dog, the human, and when the task was performed alone (F(6, 60) = 5.80, p < .05). This effect was not present in the Competition Tasks or the Tandem Tasks. These results indicate the presence of a therapy dog tends to be beneficial for promoting preschoolers' compliance with instructions in motor skills tasks that require modeling behavior, but not in those tasks that stress competition or behaviors performed in tandem.