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. 2021 Mar;24(2):311-328.
doi: 10.1007/s10071-020-01443-7. Epub 2020 Oct 28.

Dog cognitive development: a longitudinal study across the first 2 years of life

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
Affiliations

Dog cognitive development: a longitudinal study across the first 2 years of life

Emily E Bray et al. Anim Cogn. 2021 Mar.

Abstract

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; Behavior; Cognition; Development; Individual differences; Longitudinal.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of Interest: The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Declarations

Ethics approval: All testing procedures were reviewed and adhered to regulations set forth by the University of Arizona Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC # 16–175) and were collected in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations.

Data availability: The datasets generated during and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1
Tasks comprising the Dog Cognitive Development Battery (DCDB). A) Order of DCDB tasks implemented in early development (~9 weeks), consisting of three ~45-minute sessions spread out over three days. B) Order of DCDB tasks implemented in early adulthood, consisting of two ~1–1.5-hour sessions administered either on the same day or over two consecutive days. In both panels, the constructs that each task was designed to measure are indicated in bold. A version of Fig. 1a was published in Animal Behaviour, 166, Bray EE, Gruen ME, Gnanadesikan GE, Horschler DJ, Levy KM, Kennedy BS, Hare BA, MacLean EL, Cognitive characteristics of 8- to 10-week-old assistance dog puppies, 193–206, Copyright (2020), reprinted with permission from Elsevier.
Fig 2
Fig 2
Longitudinal stability of DCDB traits. Circles reflect the rank-order correlation coefficient between phenotypic measures collected from puppies and adults. Filled circles reflect significant correlations and open circles reflect correlations with p values > 0.05. For Bayesian mixed model analyses, the turquoise bars span the interquartile range of the posterior probability distribution for the beta coefficient relating puppy phenotypes and adult phenotypes; black lines span the 90% credible interval of the posterior distribution.
Fig 3
Fig 3
Traits with significant longitudinal stability. Points and error bars reflect the mean and standard error of the adult phenotype
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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