While our understanding of adult dog cognition has grown considerably over the past 20 years, relatively little is known about the ontogeny of dog cognition.
To assess the development and longitudinal stability of cognitive traits in dogs, we administered a battery of tasks to 160 candidate assistance dogs at 2 timepoints. The tasks were designed to measure diverse aspects of cognition, ranging from executive function (e.g., inhibitory control, reversal learning, memory) to sensory discrimination (e.g., vision, audition, olfaction) to social interaction with humans.
Subjects first participated as 8-10-week-old puppies, and then were retested on the same tasks at ~ 21 months of age. With few exceptions, task performance improved with age, with the largest effects observed for measures of executive function and social gaze.
Results also indicated that individual differences were both early emerging and enduring; for example, social attention to humans, use of human communicative signals, independent persistence at a problem, odor discrimination, and inhibitory control all exhibited moderate levels of rank-order stability between the two timepoints.
Using multiple regression, we found that young adult performance on many cognitive tasks could be predicted from a set of cognitive measures collected in early development. Our findings contribute to knowledge about changes in dog cognition across early development as well as the origins and developmental stability of individual differences.
Keywords: Assistance dog; Behaviour; Cognition; Development; Individual differences; Longitudinal.
Emily E Bray 1 2, Margaret E Gruen 3, Gitanjali E Gnanadesikan 4 5, Daniel J Horschler 4 5, Kerinne M Levy 6, Brenda S Kennedy 6, Brian A Hare 7 8, Evan L MacLean 4 5 9 10
Anim Cogn. 2021 Mar;24(2):311-328.doi: 10.1007/s10071-020-01443-7.
1Arizona Canine Cognition Center, School of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85719, USA. ebray@email.arizona.edu.
2Canine Companions for Independence, National Headquarters, Santa Rosa, CA, 95407, USA. ebray@email.arizona.edu.
3Department of Clinical Sciences, College of Veterinary Medicine, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, 27607, USA.
4Arizona Canine Cognition Center, School of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85719, USA.
5Cognitive Science Program, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85719, USA.
6Canine Companions for Independence, National Headquarters, Santa Rosa, CA, 95407, USA.
7Duke Canine Cognition Center, Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, Duke University, Durham, NC, 27708, USA.
8Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC, 27708, USA.
9Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85719, USA.
10College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 85719, USA.