Is dog cognition the secret to working dog success?

Brian Hare Author

04/26/2022 Added

171 Plays

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This is a recording of Dr. Brian Hare's presentation for the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation given on April 21, 2022.

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[00:00:03.769]Jeffrey Stevens: Alright, welcome back everyone.
[00:00:06.889]Jeffrey Stevens: It is my pleasure to introduce our next speaker Dr Brian Hare, who is a core member of the Center for cognitive neuroscience he's a professor and evolutionary anthropology and in psychology and neuroscience at Duke university.
[00:00:19.760]Jeffrey Stevens: Dr Hare received his bachelor's degree in anthropology and in psychology from emory university working with Mike Thomas Hello there.
[00:00:27.020]Jeffrey Stevens: He didn't completed his PhD at Harvard University, working with Richard rang them.
[00:00:31.550]Jeffrey Stevens: This is where I met him when I spent some time time in that time there and it's been a real joy since then to watch his career just absolutely skyrocket it's been really fun to watch and I might have a story or two to tell later on, if you know okay well.
[00:00:47.660]Jeffrey Stevens: let's just say what we hope he doesn't run for office anywhere.
[00:00:53.390]Jeffrey Stevens: After his PhD Dr Hare joined the Max Planck Institute for evolutionary anthropology in Leipzig Germany, where he studied Great Ape cognition now Dr Harris from Atlanta Georgia.
[00:01:06.140]Jeffrey Stevens: which you may or may not know is the home of Coca Cola.
[00:01:10.850]Jeffrey Stevens: And Brian is a huge coke man in fact so we're a Pepsi campus i'm sorry to say, we're a Pepsi campus here, so these remarks have to be edited out of the recording later on, but.
[00:01:22.940]Jeffrey Stevens: Correct me if i'm wrong here, but I believe you lobby to have a coke machine installed in the primate zookeeper area of the Leipzig zoo to feed your addiction correct yeah yeah so he has quite the quite the affinity for Coca Cola.
[00:01:39.410]Jeffrey Stevens: So, right now, though, after after Leipzig Brian moved to do where he currently directs the the Duquesne nine cognition Center.
[00:01:46.700]Jeffrey Stevens: Dr hair has also published over 100 scientific papers, along with two books his first book.
[00:01:52.400]Jeffrey Stevens: Was co authored with his wife Vanessa woods that's the genius of dogs lives in New York Times bestseller and then the very much more recently just published another book together called survival of the friendliness friendliness of the friendliest please join me in welcoming Dr here.
[00:02:15.020]Jeffrey Stevens: Thank you Jeff.
[00:02:17.420]Jeffrey Stevens: I am so happy to be here to talk about dogs with colleagues that, believe it or not, I site and read and learn from all the time, but in many cases I haven't even met so.
[00:02:29.960]Jeffrey Stevens: it's really so fun that you brought us together, and you know i'm excited to share some of the things we've learned with with you all and hear your questions as well, and I have many stories about Jeff as well, so be careful buddy.
[00:02:47.750]Jeffrey Stevens: i'll be watching the news for when you announce that you're running.
[00:02:52.400]Jeffrey Stevens: And no but it's so cool that.
[00:02:55.880]Jeffrey Stevens: Jeff has brought a group of dog researchers together and is doing what he is on campus because i'm going to share with you the work we've done at Duke, but it really.
[00:03:09.290]Jeffrey Stevens: can have a big impact, especially on undergraduates in terms of research and their motivation to succeed in science.
[00:03:19.490]Jeffrey Stevens: So with that, let me, let me just start and give you my plan Oh, and I should say thank you, of course, thank it's it's okay.
[00:03:33.200]Jeffrey Stevens: I was a bit of a prima Donna, I asked him if I can have a clicker oh it's even working right great so I don't know I like to kind of walk around or whatever.
[00:03:43.550]Jeffrey Stevens: And so I should thank people thanks Jeff thanks Pam for helping organize thanks for my co speakers and it's so cool to watch carrie talk last night.
[00:03:54.560]Jeffrey Stevens: As my former student who is a product of the canine cognition Center, I guess, in part, although she's probably starting to shape us more than we shape her at this point.
[00:04:07.190]Jeffrey Stevens: Okay, so if you're interested after my talk and learning more about what i'm going to talk about there's places to do that Jeff mentioned, we have this book.
[00:04:16.190]Jeffrey Stevens: The genius of dogs there's also i'm going to talk about dog mission data, which is a citizen science project that you can participate in, you could do that, and then I have a free online course that you can check out if you're interested okay So what are we going to talk about.
[00:04:30.590]Jeffrey Stevens: and get the point or push the right button on the pointer sorry guys.
[00:04:34.430]Jeffrey Stevens: So, first I want to introduce cognition and it's APP and and the idea of potentially applying it to the real world, and so I wanted to find what cognition is, in my mind.
[00:04:44.120]Jeffrey Stevens: Because that's what we focus on, and then I want to wonder with you and then walk through the data.
[00:04:50.870]Jeffrey Stevens: That we've collected to try to ask whether you can use dog cognition to enhance the selection of dogs that do all these great jobs for us, some of whom you met this morning that was amazing.
[00:05:02.510]Jeffrey Stevens: And also, can we use information we're collecting about dog cognition to contribute to how we breed dogs how we select dogs, the different jobs that they do, and then finally.
[00:05:15.320]Jeffrey Stevens: What about does anything about dog cognition inform how we rear our dogs and is there.
[00:05:22.370]Jeffrey Stevens: A is there an interaction between how we are our dogs and how their cognition develops, that we should be interested in and worried about.
[00:05:31.040]Jeffrey Stevens: Just like we worry about are we doing the right thing to facilitate our kids you know growing up to maximize their cognitive abilities alright so that's the menu that I hope to work through today and Jeff can you give me like a five minute kind of warning Okay, thank you.
[00:05:49.340]Jeffrey Stevens: alright.
[00:05:51.500]Jeffrey Stevens: So what is cognition well I would define it, if I have to define it very quickly, and there are many, many definitions, but but.
[00:05:59.120]Jeffrey Stevens: I would define it as private internal mental processes, you have cognition I can prove it to you very quickly, which is that you remember what you ate yesterday.
[00:06:07.850]Jeffrey Stevens: But when you are remembering something about what you ate yesterday you didn't behave there was no behavior the only behavior were internal.
[00:06:16.370]Jeffrey Stevens: to your brain neurons firing and you representing what you ate all right.
[00:06:24.530]Jeffrey Stevens: Oh, thank you for hiding the floating meeting panel, I appreciate that.
[00:06:28.850]Jeffrey Stevens: And the oh, but I think it killed my pointer Jeff when you did that.
[00:06:35.390]Jeffrey Stevens: Good Okay, then the next thing is so private internal mental processes, the next would be.
[00:06:42.320]Jeffrey Stevens: inferential reasoning that leads to flexible Problem Solving so I have eyes up here, because if you go to a party and you see somebody look at your name tag that you've known for a long time.
[00:06:52.820]Jeffrey Stevens: And All they do is move their eyes, you instantly can laser beam inside their head and they know you don't know who they are.
[00:06:58.670]Jeffrey Stevens: I mean they don't know who you are start So if you all just i've movement down to your name tag and you instantly can infer what somebody knows or doesn't know.
[00:07:06.950]Jeffrey Stevens: Okay, so that's an inference and using behavior to make an inference about the internal mental states of another person so that would be an infringer reasoning and that's a type of cognition that i'm super excited about exploring, not just in humans, but animals all right.
[00:07:23.330]Jeffrey Stevens: And then the other thing is that there's different flavors of cognition and they very independently from each other, this is another thing that.
[00:07:31.010]Jeffrey Stevens: Is sort of a theoretical standpoint that we take when we're thinking about animal cognition it's it's a little bit hard when you're talking about humans it's a little bit more controversial maybe.
[00:07:40.850]Jeffrey Stevens: But with animals it's almost impossible to ignore that they're different kinds of cognition and my my best exhibit a, for that is if anyone ever harasses you.
[00:07:51.380]Jeffrey Stevens: You know about oh there's not different types of you know, cognitive abilities there's sort of just one type or whatever we can measure it and give every animal or every individual score I always just say well how did you do, on your echolocation test.
[00:08:06.200]Jeffrey Stevens: Because obviously humans don't have the ability to echolocate.
[00:08:09.620]Jeffrey Stevens: And so we would fail miserably there organisms on this planet, that have types of perceptions and types of cognition that don't exist in humans and in the human brain.
[00:08:19.520]Jeffrey Stevens: So of course they're different types of cognition and within an individual species these types of cognition i'm going to argue very independently from each other, in some cases and that's really interesting and important.
[00:08:31.100]Jeffrey Stevens: Alright, so cognition is the mind flexibly solving problems and evolution has shaped minds to have different types of cognition to solve the problems that are important for the species of interest okay so then.
[00:08:47.690]Jeffrey Stevens: I have dog cognition because there was a point at which people would say what Why would you study dog cognition I think Kerry and frederica have done a great.
[00:08:57.050]Jeffrey Stevens: Introduction here for why you would do that and Jeff as well, actually, this morning, so let's see am I going to be there, we go yes alright, so let me just roll this video just a couple of videos of this is a young puppy using a gesture, much like fredricka showed you a pointing gesture.
[00:09:13.460]Jeffrey Stevens: We hide food one of two places the puppy doesn't know where it is, and then we just tell the puppy were.
[00:09:19.520]Jeffrey Stevens: Over there.
[00:09:21.530]Jeffrey Stevens: we'll see what the puppy does other reason is an interesting test is because around nine to 12 months of age it ends up bit.
[00:09:30.560]Jeffrey Stevens: Human children starting.
[00:09:32.990]Jeffrey Stevens: like this and it's their entrance into a cultural world children who struggled to learn to develop or a fire this ability.
[00:09:44.360]Jeffrey Stevens: struggle in different forms of cultural learning and often show development looting in language so so the fact that dogs are are using our gestural communication and we can test it in a systematic way.
[00:09:57.830]Jeffrey Stevens: Is you know quite fun, yes, we can measure, cognition um so then my next one, is a this is jaw So the first one is where dogs are being kind of interesting in a remarkable here's one.
[00:10:11.870]Jeffrey Stevens: That can be a little depressing for dog lovers or entertaining, if you like, to laugh with your dog as they struggle to solve a problem, this is a physical problem about the physical world.
[00:10:24.170]Jeffrey Stevens: And in this case we're gonna we have a barrier and the dog wants to get around the barrier that fence, if you can see it and.
[00:10:33.470]Jeffrey Stevens: and wants to get the toy this in the person's hand and there's an opening on the on your left.
[00:10:38.990]Jeffrey Stevens: The dogs left that it can just go around and get the toy and we let the dog do this very simple problem of the trick is.
[00:10:45.890]Jeffrey Stevens: You slide the barrier such that the door or the gap is closed.
[00:10:50.120]Jeffrey Stevens: And now there's a gap, on the other side of the door Now this is work that carrie Rodrigues actually helped with so she can back me up that some dogs are are reasonably good at this and then other dogs are pretty depressingly bad like the one in this video alright So here we go.
[00:11:08.390]Jeffrey Stevens: Alright, so now there is a giant gap on the fence, you can see it with your own eyes.
[00:11:16.280]Jeffrey Stevens: influenced by motor memory.
[00:11:18.920]Jeffrey Stevens: prioritizing our memory.
[00:11:22.760]Jeffrey Stevens: From this dog okay all right So these are examples of types of cognitive tasks that we can run to test how dog solve problems and sometimes how they can solve them.
[00:11:32.780]Jeffrey Stevens: And I would argue that these are different types of cognitive abilities they're not measuring the same thing potentially alright.
[00:11:39.620]Jeffrey Stevens: So just orient you all right, but, but one of the things that's really important in terms of where we're going to go in terms of trying to use these Games are these tests to do something in the real world is that they're quick.
[00:11:51.170]Jeffrey Stevens: So there's been a lot of talk already about training right training, working dogs and the hard work that goes into that months and weeks, etc, but what's the beauty of these tests is they're designed to be spontaneous measures there's no training involved.
[00:12:04.910]Jeffrey Stevens: I want these games if done correctly of her for each individual dog, it could be 515 30 minutes.
[00:12:13.760]Jeffrey Stevens: So instead of weeks of training and lots of repetition etc we're really interested in what the dog is bringing to the test already what are they already know and understand about the world.
[00:12:23.510]Jeffrey Stevens: And then, looking at how different dogs solve these types of problems okay so it's no training spontaneous Problem Solving very few repetitions which means it's quick.
[00:12:33.530]Jeffrey Stevens: Alright, relatively speaking, of course, alright So what about when you compare dogs on a bunch of social task at the top and.
[00:12:41.450]Jeffrey Stevens: marker gaze point, these are just social games, where they have to understand these gestures like you saw in that first video, and then a range of physical problems.
[00:12:49.970]Jeffrey Stevens: Things that involve having to remember where things are in space, making inferences about where things have been hidden based on the sounds they're making.
[00:12:58.490]Jeffrey Stevens: And then, comparing dogs to young children and great apes our closest living primate relatives well what we found overall is that.
[00:13:07.370]Jeffrey Stevens: If you were to ask me of all the organisms that we worked with which of them, the non humans, which of them is most like a human.
[00:13:16.310]Jeffrey Stevens: Which one has a performance most like human children when it comes to understanding social gestures like marker point.
[00:13:25.340]Jeffrey Stevens: Reaching for something that's hidden in there, trying to find it, I would say, well, I think, dogs are most similar actually our closest private relatives are not as much like us as dog so.
[00:13:36.320]Jeffrey Stevens: That is really exciting if you're a dog lover wow I knew it dogs are so smart, except that when you ask about.
[00:13:44.000]Jeffrey Stevens: Solving problems in the physical world don't ask your dog to do your physics homework, you will be disappointed, so in that regard dogs are not the most similar to our young children.
[00:13:56.780]Jeffrey Stevens: Young human kids It really seems to be that it's something about their social interaction with us that makes them really remarkable.
[00:14:06.050]Jeffrey Stevens: Okay, and what the overall finding is, we found that dogs are like two and a half year old toddlers and they outperform adult non human apes.
[00:14:14.000]Jeffrey Stevens: On these cooperative communicative problems where you're gesturing and you're trying to communicate something to them like you saw on that first video.
[00:14:20.720]Jeffrey Stevens: But dogs fail on physical reasoning tasks and look very different as a species, when you look at all of their data together okay.
[00:14:30.380]Jeffrey Stevens: So this just quickly says that we identified something that's really quite remarkable about dog cognition.
[00:14:36.920]Jeffrey Stevens: they're more like our human our own children than our closest ape relatives, so that then sets up this problem of will, why and what's the origin of this and a lot of people, including Frederick or rhonda and carry have worked on trying to understand this.
[00:14:52.910]Jeffrey Stevens: All right, but in the process of doing this, where we're just comparing we're doing these species comparisons we're trying to like understand.
[00:15:01.520]Jeffrey Stevens: All right, is this species, better than that can they outperform of course we're testing lots of individuals and not every individual is the same, and what we started to realize is that individual variability is really interesting.
[00:15:13.430]Jeffrey Stevens: So i'm going to just show you quickly some data, where we compared individual variability in social and ethical reasoning across these three species, so when we look at four, and let me clarify what I mean.
[00:15:25.670]Jeffrey Stevens: Remember, I told you, there are different types of cognitive abilities and they vary independently, so this is going to be my first piece of evidence that that may be actually the case so.
[00:15:34.580]Jeffrey Stevens: Imagine someone gave you a math problem and they asked the question how you do on that math problem does that predict how you'll do on another math problem right.
[00:15:42.290]Jeffrey Stevens: Or does it also predict how you'll do on writing an English essay alright, so what i'm suggesting is that when I give you one math problem it'll.
[00:15:50.720]Jeffrey Stevens: you'll do on another math problem but it's not necessarily going to tell me much about your essay.
[00:15:54.560]Jeffrey Stevens: And how you're going to do, and vice versa, if I give you an essay it won't predict how you'll write your next day, or would it would be.
[00:16:00.080]Jeffrey Stevens: instructive of how you would write your next essay it's not gonna tell you much about how you're gonna do on the math exam.
[00:16:04.790]Jeffrey Stevens: And the math problem okay so that's kind of what we see here with human kids the blue is the physical problems, and they are clustered together and they're kind of related This is like a pedigree of problem solving.
[00:16:17.420]Jeffrey Stevens: And so the orange is the social So you can see, they kind of cluster together.
[00:16:21.290]Jeffrey Stevens: ask the same question of chimpanzees it seems that actually they're not solving all these what we think of as social and physical problems using different types of cognitive abilities, because.
[00:16:32.900]Jeffrey Stevens: How they do on one math problem isn't predicting how they'll do on the next versus English so it's not differentiating when we're playing these Games, but when we did the same type of analysis with dogs.
[00:16:42.260]Jeffrey Stevens: at an individual level they look much more like humans than our close relatives, so not only is it that.
[00:16:49.700]Jeffrey Stevens: Their social performance and their understanding of these different cooperative communicative tasks, or at least the overall skill, they show is more human like, but also when you look at their individual variability they have.
[00:17:01.400]Jeffrey Stevens: A differentiation between their social understanding and physical it's more similar to what we're seeing in young human kids.
[00:17:09.140]Jeffrey Stevens: Okay.
[00:17:11.330]Jeffrey Stevens: So.
[00:17:12.890]Jeffrey Stevens: Seeing that dogs might be unusual in this way lead a lot of folks including frederica myself to start comparing dogs to their closest living relative the wolf and I also actually went to Siberia and worked with to be true belie of boxes.
[00:17:31.670]Jeffrey Stevens: That were selected for friendliness, they were selected against aggression, but also for friendliness towards the human experimenters and I did comparisons on that pointing test that frederica was talking about.
[00:17:45.350]Jeffrey Stevens: And that I just showed you the video of and I worked with puppies are actually in the case of foxes you call them kits so I worked with young fox kits and we compare their ability to use human pointing gestures to.
[00:18:01.430]Jeffrey Stevens: Control line so one line of fox has been selected to be friendly as fredricka highlighted, but another line was actually selected randomly.
[00:18:09.170]Jeffrey Stevens: For how they interact with people, and so what we found was that the population that had been selected to be attracted and friendly towards people were as good as dog puppies at using human gestures.
[00:18:22.400]Jeffrey Stevens: The control line was was not as good, and then we have now.
[00:18:28.550]Jeffrey Stevens: Much like what fredricka was highlighting in her own work we've gone and compared young wolves and young dogs.
[00:18:36.290]Jeffrey Stevens: To each other on the same task and found basically the same pattern, so what it seems like is that cooperative communication is something that.
[00:18:43.820]Jeffrey Stevens: dogs are quite good at relative to wolves and great apes, and that is a result of domestication I would argue it's also the result of selection for friendliness.
[00:18:56.900]Jeffrey Stevens: Okay.
[00:18:58.940]Jeffrey Stevens: So.
[00:19:01.790]Jeffrey Stevens: Frederick you did a great job setting me up here, so I don't have to dilly dally on this too long, but it's also quite exciting that there's been this identification potentially of an oxytocin loop an interspecies oxytocin loop between.
[00:19:16.640]Jeffrey Stevens: humans and dogs it's the first interspecies evidence for this.
[00:19:21.950]Jeffrey Stevens: And it may just be specific to pet dogs, who have been socialized and lived with humans and not been raised with a lot of other dogs, but the fact that dogs even have the capacity for this at all is quite remarkable.
[00:19:34.100]Jeffrey Stevens: And it suggests that that capacity to form this loop may be a result of their evolution during domestication Okay, so this is going to be really important and set up our test of whether we can use cognitive abilities an individual differences in them to think about working dogs so.
[00:19:55.490]Jeffrey Stevens: The fact that there are these unique features that are result in domestication but before I leave, I just wanted to remind carrie have her start because carrie actually was a I should say, Dr Rodriguez.
[00:20:11.930]Jeffrey Stevens: She actually collected and was there when we started raising the wolf puppies and very intensively raising wolf puppies to participate in these types of games like Frederick I told you about how it takes a lot of work.
[00:20:26.780]Jeffrey Stevens: Because wolves really need to know the people they're going to be working with.
[00:20:31.970]Jeffrey Stevens: Otherwise they're they're very nervous and you know it's very difficult for them to participate so anyway carry there you are hugging wolf puppies.
[00:20:42.530]Jeffrey Stevens: So.
[00:20:44.630]Jeffrey Stevens: All right, so this all sets up and trying to understand the origin of dogs being kind of unusual in their ability to understand us potentially.
[00:20:54.110]Jeffrey Stevens: In interacting with us, and whether it's understanding our gestures as a command is Frederick is arguing or I would argue understanding communicative intention that allows them to understand it as a command.
[00:21:06.380]Jeffrey Stevens: We think that that is a result of what happened during domestic that it really is something that, just like dolphins have echolocation dogs have evolved this ability to interact with us in a new and special way.
[00:21:19.040]Jeffrey Stevens: All right, but in doing that research and trying to understand where that comes from again we saw all this individual variability and it dawned on us, especially as we started interacting with more people in the dog world dog pet owners dog.
[00:21:36.740]Jeffrey Stevens: People training dogs whether they're you know, trying to help pets with problems or dogs finding bombs or dogs doing service or assistance or therapy.
[00:21:46.850]Jeffrey Stevens: wow I wonder if this individual variability would be useful, so, first let me just give you an example of.
[00:21:55.130]Jeffrey Stevens: An extreme example a fun example of some of the individual variability we've seen this is similar to the tasks that.
[00:22:02.840]Jeffrey Stevens: Frederick showed with the wolves and the dogs that they were shown they could solve the problem, but then the problem was made impossible to solve, and she was seeing how they were so persistent.
[00:22:12.920]Jeffrey Stevens: And so we have seen not only the persistence and the communication that's been talked about before but we've also.
[00:22:20.480]Jeffrey Stevens: seen a lot of individual variability, so this is a great example of even within dogs, is what I mean, so this is a great example we're gonna, this is just a box, the dogs have been shown that there's food in the box, but then the box.
[00:22:33.980]Jeffrey Stevens: Is tightened up.
[00:22:57.110]Jeffrey Stevens: response.
[00:22:59.600]Jeffrey Stevens: immediately upon discovery boxes unknowable goes and really starts aggressively.
[00:23:09.980]Jeffrey Stevens: Not taking no for an answer there's your tail wagging frederica.
[00:23:15.470]Jeffrey Stevens: Making a lot of eye contact hello, you have a thumb.
[00:23:20.780]Jeffrey Stevens: I do not.
[00:23:23.570]Jeffrey Stevens: You love me don't you hear me helped me yes.
[00:23:29.030]Jeffrey Stevens: Okay, so that type of response and forced.
[00:23:34.820]Jeffrey Stevens: argument that they're using humans as tools and trying to.
[00:23:38.900]Jeffrey Stevens: elicit help and they're more communicative.
[00:23:43.070]Jeffrey Stevens: So the.
[00:23:45.920]Jeffrey Stevens: Of course, and now Frederick has done a closer exam examination, which is really interesting, but the point here is that.
[00:23:54.020]Jeffrey Stevens: We see this type of individual variability not only within dogs, but this is within a closed breeding population.
[00:24:00.650]Jeffrey Stevens: of service dogs that I would argue, everybody would, if you see this talking to ask you say oh that's a Labrador retriever I would actually argue it is not a Labrador retriever it has its origin in a.
[00:24:11.180]Jeffrey Stevens: breeding pool that originally was a Labrador golden retriever pool but it's been selected so strongly.
[00:24:17.330]Jeffrey Stevens: Against aggression for friendliness over the last 3035 40 years that I think it's a new breed it's a canine companion breed and even within that very carefully selected pool of dogs for service that can show no aggression whatsoever in their in their job.
[00:24:38.570]Jeffrey Stevens: there's this tremendous individual variability.
[00:24:41.180]Jeffrey Stevens: And even more interesting is that the the extremes you saw demonstrating this video what we're what i'm going to show you in a minute with the data we have is this is one of the games that as silly as it is.
[00:24:52.700]Jeffrey Stevens: And it's really embarrassing because you go to genetics talks, or you know conferences or neuroscience conferences and I get up and show this.
[00:24:59.090]Jeffrey Stevens: But it's very much associated with which training, you will be successful with So the first dog that's really persistent.
[00:25:09.020]Jeffrey Stevens: Is a dog that will do really, really well in bomb detection training potentially a job, where you have to be more independent and less reliant on your handler.
[00:25:19.280]Jeffrey Stevens: The second dog is going to be much more successful potentially in a job that is related to service that's involved, where you need to be interacting and reliant on the person you're with you know, in a stronger way okay so.
[00:25:35.000]Jeffrey Stevens: That leads to a hypothesis, and the hypothesis is that individual differences in cognitive skills cause individual differences in working dog performance Now I want you to understand that this hypothesis.
[00:25:46.160]Jeffrey Stevens: is the product of an evolutionary approach, we were trying to understand the evolution of an domestication impact as a basic research.
[00:25:56.090]Jeffrey Stevens: approach to understanding motivation temperament cognition and it led to now this application of what we learned because we didn't go in thinking about individual differences.
[00:26:05.900]Jeffrey Stevens: We just couldn't ignore them because they were so big and then it made us realize there's a hypothesis that these individual differences actual could be really important for thinking about differences in success and training now.
[00:26:20.150]Jeffrey Stevens: There is tremendous individual difference in success in training on the dog side of the leash so.
[00:26:27.980]Jeffrey Stevens: Dr Rodriguez gave a brilliant talk last night, talking about the impact that dogs may be having on the humans, they are paired with, but the other side of the leash.
[00:26:36.950]Jeffrey Stevens: Is all those trainers that work for months trying to get those dogs ready to do that and it ends up that, depending on the program and and and what they're being trained for.
[00:26:45.650]Jeffrey Stevens: There it is much harder to go to college to become a working dog than it is to go to college in the United States as a human.
[00:26:53.600]Jeffrey Stevens: You are much more likely to fail, out of working dog college, about half of the school i'm sorry about half of the students fail so at us, universities, that is not the rate and so.
[00:27:06.920]Jeffrey Stevens: It is very difficult for these dogs to make it through the programs and be successful obtaining what they need to obtain in terms of the skills that they have to demonstrate.
[00:27:16.280]Jeffrey Stevens: And so, then the question becomes why, and is there a way we could do better, could we get more dogs being successfully trained and is some of the cognitive variability in across individual dogs is that related to why some dogs are successful and some dogs are not.
[00:27:31.940]Jeffrey Stevens: Alright So what about is there even really an Ai it should we even be thinking about cognition as dogs are working well as an example let's take dogs that find explosives so.
[00:27:47.420]Jeffrey Stevens: What what is it that explosive detection and I add just stands for improvised.
[00:27:55.190]Jeffrey Stevens: explosive detector dogs.
[00:27:57.830]Jeffrey Stevens: So what are what what could what type of cognition could these dogs be using as they're trying to find a bomb to protect the humans there with.
[00:28:06.770]Jeffrey Stevens: Well i'm their social, cognition that they use there's physical cognition they're going to have to rely on their temperament that's going to be.
[00:28:14.330]Jeffrey Stevens: critical and, of course, this is where most of the historic and most of the effort historically has been there's tremendous individual variability and temperament that's been used very productively to increase training outcomes.
[00:28:25.550]Jeffrey Stevens: But there's also self control, which is of course interacting with temperament.
[00:28:30.620]Jeffrey Stevens: And memory, a the ability to remember not only where you are in space, but remember what you're looking for.
[00:28:36.620]Jeffrey Stevens: And how to represent what you're looking for in your mind as things you're not looking for are flooding your perceptual system.
[00:28:44.390]Jeffrey Stevens: So all of these different cognitive abilities may be recruited and important and there's individual variability in each one of them could we find a cognitive profile that predicts success so that's the game we're going to play and i'll tell you the progress we've made so far.
[00:29:00.230]Jeffrey Stevens: So what we did, to try to go at this is, together with Professor Evan mclean of former student who's at university of Arizona and runs a dog Center now as well and is row couple and amazing and many kudos and.
[00:29:20.780]Jeffrey Stevens: Thanks to him for everything i'm about to present.
[00:29:23.720]Jeffrey Stevens: So what we did is we sat down and said look, you know we started in and said Oh, maybe we can make predictions about you know what it would be that they would need to do these jobs, and then we just sort of said I think that's going to be really bad.
[00:29:35.930]Jeffrey Stevens: I think that if we start making a lot of predictions and he says, if we start making a lot of friction we're going to miss something.
[00:29:40.820]Jeffrey Stevens: So why don't we just try to think of every test that we think is a really good dog test now because there have been people studying Dr cognition for.
[00:29:48.590]Jeffrey Stevens: Over a decade or so we were like let's take the games that we think are a reasonable test of something and let's just do them all.
[00:29:57.140]Jeffrey Stevens: let's do it let's just go full a theoretical approach here, and every problem we can come up with let's do it, so we came up with a list of over two dozen games.
[00:30:07.100]Jeffrey Stevens: And this was our list it's just a bunch of stuff that test we think we can categorize them into different types of cognition and they measure.
[00:30:18.860]Jeffrey Stevens: different categories of cognition, but this is our list that we threw at the dogs trying to just test as much as we could.
[00:30:28.040]Jeffrey Stevens: All right, um and then we tested dogs from a variety of backgrounds, we had a heterogeneous population of pet dogs from folks living near Duke university and the triangle, bringing their dogs in.
[00:30:41.960]Jeffrey Stevens: And then we had dogs being trained us detector dogs for the marine corps and we had dogs that are trained by canon companions for service.
[00:30:51.830]Jeffrey Stevens: And we tested all the dogs that are hundreds of dogs and we tested them all before they were trained.
[00:30:59.360]Jeffrey Stevens: So this is right, as they go to college kind of like an entrance exam except for it didn't matter and then then they're trained and then we can see who's successful or not.
[00:31:10.610]Jeffrey Stevens: Alright So the first thing we discovered, though in testing all these dogs is remember, I made the claim that there's different kinds of cognition they very independently well actually no one had ever demonstrated that before.
[00:31:22.220]Jeffrey Stevens: You know, statistically, and so we had a data set now for the first time, we could kind of look at that and so what we found was that the games that we thought.
[00:31:30.920]Jeffrey Stevens: would be related to each other, we kind of met, we thought we were measuring these internal processes, we kind of had a couple of ways to measure.
[00:31:38.420]Jeffrey Stevens: Different types of internal processes right so let's say.
[00:31:41.750]Jeffrey Stevens: let's call it math we had two measures of math and we we always try to have two measures of English if we thought they were some internal process that we were measure we kind of had tried to have multiple measures of each in that set of 25.
[00:31:54.350]Jeffrey Stevens: And what we found was we could have had infinite number of results here, and it was terrifying how many results, we could have had and that's as somebody before we analyze I was like it's gonna be a disaster.
[00:32:05.780]Jeffrey Stevens: When we do an analysis to see which Games were correlated with which what we found was.
[00:32:11.480]Jeffrey Stevens: that a lot of the games that we thought would be related to one to one another really were.
[00:32:16.160]Jeffrey Stevens: If you did well on one math problem it predicted you do well on another they were correlated the individual differences.
[00:32:22.370]Jeffrey Stevens: across different individuals, if you do bad on one you want you do bad in math on one problem you do bad, on the other problem and across individuals those types of games and the performance of individuals related to each other so that's just what the shows.
[00:32:36.110]Jeffrey Stevens: And so, then we were able to say Okay, there really are these different types of cognitive abilities and they very independently.
[00:32:43.340]Jeffrey Stevens: Because we can we have multiple measures and they're related to each other, and we think they measure different things and they're more related.
[00:32:49.100]Jeffrey Stevens: The Games, that we think are related are more related to each other than they are the games that we didn't think they were related to you so back to the math and math problem English essay analogy.
[00:32:59.000]Jeffrey Stevens: Alright, so now that we have this tool, where we can measure into individual variability.
[00:33:04.910]Jeffrey Stevens: And across these different types of cognitive abilities that I just highlighted might lead to a lot of the individual cognitive variability in training success.
[00:33:14.030]Jeffrey Stevens: For these working dogs, now we wanted to ask the question can we have any impact on selection breeding and rearing or can it teach us something about it.
[00:33:24.140]Jeffrey Stevens: So step one is is the individual variability that I just highlighted in cognitive skill across those different types of cognition is it even associated with training success first thing we have to show is it's even associated.
[00:33:37.790]Jeffrey Stevens: Is it a dog that has one cognitive set of one set of cognitive skills or performance does that relate to their training success.
[00:33:47.570]Jeffrey Stevens: Or is it just it's all over the place and they're not related at all.
[00:33:50.630]Jeffrey Stevens: And then the second thing is that we do find that association, I mean finding correlations interesting but can we actually predict anything if we did it again now that we know what's associated.
[00:33:59.690]Jeffrey Stevens: Can we run another set of dogs and make some predictions with models about who will be successful at performing.
[00:34:07.460]Jeffrey Stevens: During college.
[00:34:10.580]Jeffrey Stevens: Alright, so this is the first step, or we tested all the dogs on those 25 tests and what we found is that for the.
[00:34:21.770]Jeffrey Stevens: detector dogs, there were a bunch of tests that were associated with success, as measured by the organization, we were working with I said I because carries the audience, and that was a lot of work and carrie did a lot of it.
[00:34:36.740]Jeffrey Stevens: And so we were able to correlate the performance that dogs had in their cognitive tasks those 25 cognitive tasks and we found eight that was really a.
[00:34:50.810]Jeffrey Stevens: sort of associated with various performance metrics that the organization training them used and felt were important for their success in their Program.
[00:34:59.750]Jeffrey Stevens: Interestingly enough, with the working dogs that were being trained for service, we were able to do the same thing we found in this case 11 games that were related to their success and training.
[00:35:12.890]Jeffrey Stevens: And what's interesting is that five of the Games in both groups were the same were related to performance in.
[00:35:21.320]Jeffrey Stevens: The training that they need to accomplish, but we also found opposite associations were, in fact, as I hinted to you with the unsolvable task.
[00:35:31.340]Jeffrey Stevens: Where one performance predicted success and training.
[00:35:35.510]Jeffrey Stevens: For detection and another performance predicted success for service, and so the other one is the causal reasoning task, and this is another one it's really depressing if you're a dog lover and if you're someone who likes great apes you're like see.
[00:35:49.070]Jeffrey Stevens: They don't they're not that smart this game, just to tell you, because I know we all love laughing with our dogs.
[00:35:55.790]Jeffrey Stevens: It you put a.
[00:35:57.770]Jeffrey Stevens: bucket that has a toy and food in and you cover it with a towel, and then you put another towel this just on the ground Okay, and then they have to find where the toy is based on the visual information that.
[00:36:10.130]Jeffrey Stevens: there's this big hump in the middle of the floor underneath the towel, so you can't see the bucket or the toy or the food.
[00:36:16.190]Jeffrey Stevens: And there's another towel just on the ground, of course, we've introduced the idea that they they could find it in either of these locations and what you find is that the worst they perform on that and there's some dogs that are utterly flummoxed by this.
[00:36:29.390]Jeffrey Stevens: I don't know where it is could be under that towel under the floor.
[00:36:33.380]Jeffrey Stevens: The the worst they do on this, the better they potentially we're doing in graduating in service, the service dogs in particular we're pretty bad at this.
[00:36:44.750]Jeffrey Stevens: Okay, so again it's not about you know let's find a smart dog it's what's associated with success we didn't care what the direction was.
[00:36:52.610]Jeffrey Stevens: Okay, poor cognitive performance was associated with assistance dog success already just said that one, and then there were.
[00:37:00.590]Jeffrey Stevens: tests that had the strongest association and those are start and it ends up that they were not universal across the two populations, in fact, only one was.
[00:37:11.450]Jeffrey Stevens: The causal reasoning seem to be really strongly associated with success in both programs in the opposite direction, though, and they were.
[00:37:19.850]Jeffrey Stevens: The other most strongly associated tasks were different, and, obviously, if you're trying to find bombs you're not surprised at odor discrimination is really important that's not surprising, but you know you know, using the causal reasoning task that might be surprising.
[00:37:40.100]Jeffrey Stevens: The unsolvable task might be surprising, although I think Federico would say that's persistence that's really important for detecting bombs so and then, in the case of.
[00:37:52.250]Jeffrey Stevens: The service dogs the strongest things were things like.
[00:37:57.560]Jeffrey Stevens: Asking see number nine the social referencing that sort of asking for help, or or responding to humans response to something else that's new.
[00:38:07.640]Jeffrey Stevens: And another one that would be surprising, though, as a spatial transportation trans spatial transposition where they're understanding how something hidden has been moved in space when they couldn't view it being moved.
[00:38:19.160]Jeffrey Stevens: So anyway that's the overall pattern, and then we worked with another completely new novel group of dogs that were not in the original association study.
[00:38:31.280]Jeffrey Stevens: This is the nice thing about dogs and not primates as people who I Jeff and I have both worked many years with primates as well and it's this would be impossible if we were studying primates but thankfully dogs, you can do this kind of thing.
[00:38:44.960]Jeffrey Stevens: So we got a whole nother group almost over 200 dogs almost 100 and each group and we tested them again and what we found was the patterns again basically replicated.
[00:38:58.550]Jeffrey Stevens: And then, for the population from canon companions we were actually able to develop statistical models, with the help of a statistician and Evan worked really hard and mclean worked really hard on this, and what we were able to find was that.
[00:39:14.240]Jeffrey Stevens: Five of the eight models were able to predict assistance dog graduation, based on the set of cognitive games that we had given them now, the whole goal of this was I have.
[00:39:28.190]Jeffrey Stevens: I forgot one little tiny detail that might be interesting, the whole goal of this was to do it fast.
[00:39:33.230]Jeffrey Stevens: And so, actually the predictive test we took only the games that were highly associated.
[00:39:39.260]Jeffrey Stevens: In the previous association study we dropped, all the other games, so this is a smaller battery of tasks when we replicated it so it's not a faithful replication it was taking.
[00:39:48.230]Jeffrey Stevens: The tasks that were highly associated and replicating specifically those and we found the same pattern again with these new dogs and we were able to develop models where before they went into training.
[00:39:58.190]Jeffrey Stevens: We basically asked the model based on their cognitive data to predict who's going to make it or not, and.
[00:40:05.540]Jeffrey Stevens: Many several the models worked pretty well.
[00:40:09.500]Jeffrey Stevens: So we have some ability to predict performance based on cognition.
[00:40:14.960]Jeffrey Stevens: Oh, that sets us up for selection when we're selecting dogs that there does seem to be something there that cognition is very much involved in dog solving problems and individual variability might help us.
[00:40:28.310]Jeffrey Stevens: get more dogs potentially to graduation, as we keep understanding more about that association all right so check check alright so next What about breeding.
[00:40:41.090]Jeffrey Stevens: All right, I have to introduce a new tool, a different tool which is citizen science so.
[00:40:46.850]Jeffrey Stevens: We got very interested in the problem that lots of people are interested in usually the first question, I get when people find out I work with dogs oh tell me about cognitive differences across different breeds.
[00:40:56.390]Jeffrey Stevens: That is a really hard quantitative problem there are hundreds of breeds, and I have to work with hundreds of dogs per breed to be able to tell you anything about breed differences in any statistically meaningful way.
[00:41:08.000]Jeffrey Stevens: If you're asking me, as a scientist, so we realized if we were ever going to get out that problem that we have US citizen science, so we developed an online platform where people.
[00:41:18.020]Jeffrey Stevens: were provided with instructions via video and text on how to play a number of the games that actually we used in that battery for working dogs.
[00:41:29.540]Jeffrey Stevens: We then recorded people could record their dogs responses, they played the game, as they were playing along.
[00:41:36.260]Jeffrey Stevens: So basically you could click a button did your dog get it right, or they get it wrong or did they choose left or right.
[00:41:42.380]Jeffrey Stevens: And then they got what what was in it for the people doing it is.
[00:41:46.970]Jeffrey Stevens: We got all the data, but they got a report comparing their dogs all the other dogs that had previously played the same games.
[00:41:53.360]Jeffrey Stevens: Because often people and i'm sure all of you have had this where people say Oh, when you meet somebody and they start talking about their own dog they'll either say oh my dog so smart.
[00:42:00.470]Jeffrey Stevens: let's say oh my dog is so not smart and so i'm always thinking in my head compared to what, and so I think compared to other dogs and so.
[00:42:08.510]Jeffrey Stevens: If you know that there's different kinds of cognitive abilities, then it's really interesting to see how they compare to other dogs across these different cognitive abilities.
[00:42:16.940]Jeffrey Stevens: So anyway, that people had fun doing this and as a result, we got data from over 30,000 dogs from all over the world okay now, I have a data set finally where we can start looking at.
[00:42:29.570]Jeffrey Stevens: breed differences are all sorts of other questions potentially.
[00:42:33.800]Jeffrey Stevens: But it's citizen science and no one had ever asked anyone that I know of to conduct experiments.
[00:42:39.770]Jeffrey Stevens: Most citizen science is you know hey there's a did you see a bird in your neighborhood or at your feeder or you know, can you take a picture of the trees and your neighborhood or whatever, and so.
[00:42:50.930]Jeffrey Stevens: You know this was like you have to do experiments that we worry a lot about how they're being conducted so honestly I thought, maybe this is mostly going to be educational I didn't know if it would be any useful for any science.
[00:43:02.450]Jeffrey Stevens: But what we found and we published a paper in 2015 we were able to show that citizen, scientists and the data from that project replicated all the previous findings from.
[00:43:13.130]Jeffrey Stevens: The studies that those methods were based on so basically.
[00:43:17.150]Jeffrey Stevens: citizen scientists, with all the noise and biases that you could imagine would have been going on as they're conducting these experiments and they did i'm not arguing they didn't because I saw people.
[00:43:27.740]Jeffrey Stevens: Totally do crazy things and I think carrie highlighted some of that too, and again carrie was helpful in creating and running cognition to.
[00:43:37.700]Jeffrey Stevens: We were able to replicate findings from the literature okay so, then the other thing is, we looked at the first 500 dogs and subsequent we've done.
[00:43:46.250]Jeffrey Stevens: Other versions of this with larger samples of thousands of dogs and we again with these dogs found a different types of cognition that very independently, so we had multiple games 10 games.
[00:43:57.560]Jeffrey Stevens: And the games that we thought would be related to each other, because we had multiple measures five types of games and two of each they were the Games, we thought would be correlated we're okay so.
[00:44:10.280]Jeffrey Stevens: I had to tell you about citizen science to then tell you about what we've learned about breeding and I want to ask the question about.
[00:44:15.470]Jeffrey Stevens: heritability of cognitive traits because if we're going to use cognition in any interesting way for selection of dogs for doing jobs.
[00:44:23.630]Jeffrey Stevens: Well, the cognitive abilities, have to be heritable if they're not heritable well you there's no genetic variation to work with, and then the second thing is well Okay, if it is heritable.
[00:44:33.770]Jeffrey Stevens: helpful would be being able to identify whatever genetic mechanism, whether it's snips or genes are associated with the individual variability because then you could actually pick out dogs that might be particularly high and their potential when you're doing your breeding.
[00:44:54.020]Jeffrey Stevens: Okay, so.
[00:44:57.020]Jeffrey Stevens: First, can we even find any breed differences, using the cognition data.
[00:45:03.440]Jeffrey Stevens: So we did do we use data from thousands of the dogs from cognition and we looked at all the different measures of cognition that we use and that's indicated by the little circles up there, those are two different things we measured.
[00:45:19.640]Jeffrey Stevens: And what we found might be surprising, which is that only two of our five types of cognition actually had any relationship to breed.
[00:45:28.760]Jeffrey Stevens: So it seems that, especially when it comes to cognition there's tremendous individual breed variation and it swamps out any between breed variation.
[00:45:38.630]Jeffrey Stevens: So what i'm saying is dogs have tons of cognitive variation but it's not explained as much as one might believe by breed.
[00:45:46.250]Jeffrey Stevens: Now temperament and other measures things like emotional reactivity motivation, they may be more specific to breed but at least when the things we were measuring things like remembering or communicating or.
[00:45:58.340]Jeffrey Stevens: inferring those things seem to be really a lot of variability.
[00:46:04.220]Jeffrey Stevens: Within breed not between what where we did find an interesting finding is that when you look at things that you might characterize as executive function functioning like a.
[00:46:14.780]Jeffrey Stevens: memory spatial memory and also a measure of self control, there is a very strong link to brain size and brain size that is related to a dog's body size so bigger dogs are performing better on measures of memory and measures of self control.
[00:46:34.400]Jeffrey Stevens: But even controlling for body size, this relationship is still very strong so that is really the big thing we found in terms of looking at breed differences.
[00:46:43.850]Jeffrey Stevens: So i'm just trying to point that out that the data set is is very meaningful in terms of being able to test the ideas you're interested in and we use that same data to then move, and this is work done by.
[00:46:57.560]Jeffrey Stevens: Evan maclean's graduate student and his team at university of Arizona, together with our team, and this is again a destiny work.
[00:47:07.910]Jeffrey Stevens: And what she found was that some of the Games, when she used basically breed averages and use publicly available data sets on genetic variability across breeds and use breed averages, both for the cognitive measures and her genetic data and it's a first attempt to look at heritability.
[00:47:29.690]Jeffrey Stevens: that some of the measures, there was really low heritability okay so things like memory and reasoning, the measures of memory and reason we use for cognition.
[00:47:37.280]Jeffrey Stevens: Low heritability but for others, there was actually pretty high variability human height, which is the.
[00:47:42.980]Jeffrey Stevens: Probably among the highest heritable traits and humans, I believe, is point six there's variability of course, of course, depending on what population but it's Point six is like remarkably high heritability and for a behavioral trait.
[00:47:56.120]Jeffrey Stevens: To have somewhere between point five, and point six for our measure of cutting which I can explain to you later.
[00:48:04.880]Jeffrey Stevens: Or the communication measure having point four somewhere around there that's really high heritability what that means there's a cross individual very across individuals.
[00:48:15.080]Jeffrey Stevens: There is individual very genetic individual variability that is related to the behavioral variability so that means there's something to potentially select.
[00:48:25.190]Jeffrey Stevens: If there was no genetic variability, as is the case, it seems from memory, for instance, or not that much anyway there's not that much to work with if you're trying to breathe.
[00:48:36.560]Jeffrey Stevens: Okay, so um This is just saying that we're.
[00:48:41.420]Jeffrey Stevens: Also, looking at what was linked to success and training and the one that probably is the most interesting that has a lot of variability are high heritability and was really.
[00:48:50.270]Jeffrey Stevens: linked to success, both in the Association and the prediction studies, we ran was the use of communicative gestures so that's one where maybe across different populations, you could target.
[00:49:02.360]Jeffrey Stevens: dogs and breed based on that, and you might have a change in terms of success and training programs based on your breathing.
[00:49:10.190]Jeffrey Stevens: Just ask the question okay that's great have a terrible but um, are there any associations with either snips or genes so geeta worked really hard and Evan worked really hard and they identified five single nucleotide polymorphous isms and.
[00:49:28.250]Jeffrey Stevens: 188 genes that were associated with these breed averages on those different measures of cognitive ability, so it does seem that there's we could get down a level of detail, and maybe figure out what might be targeted if you were selecting dogs for training.
[00:49:47.510]Jeffrey Stevens: And importantly D to also looked at the relation of these markers to end their their job in the body, because maybe you find the five snips that are related to the individual variability.
[00:50:03.920]Jeffrey Stevens: Or maybe you find 188 genes that are related to the variability and cognition but they're the genes themselves are actually really involved in the production of hormones that allow for you know kidney function.
[00:50:17.090]Jeffrey Stevens: Okay Well now, you may be hit a dead end, but what she found was that the genes that were related are genes that are.
[00:50:24.320]Jeffrey Stevens: very much involved in brain development and function, both in dogs mammals and humans, more generally, so again that's just more hopeful evidence that there really is a path forward here potentially.
[00:50:37.550]Jeffrey Stevens: Alright, so heritable yes we've got some evidence that these measures are heritable and to that we're making headway on as a field, I would say.
[00:50:49.250]Jeffrey Stevens: You know, trying to locate even more specifically great that it's heritable but What could we use as markers genetically or genomic Lee to.
[00:50:59.330]Jeffrey Stevens: Potentially target our selection alright So what about rearing, we also use cognition data to look at cognition as it develops across the LIFE path, this is cross sectional data each dogs only sampled once.
[00:51:13.250]Jeffrey Stevens: So this is a variety of dogs at different ages, and this is just a summary data set showing you the means and the.
[00:51:21.230]Jeffrey Stevens: measure of of error, showing you that as dogs get older they start looking at their human owners more and then, as they get older.
[00:51:32.600]Jeffrey Stevens: And unfortunately the ages are listed here is days, but as they get older and it's like 1112 years of age, they they stopped making that I contact as much so so it's just trying to show you there's this U shaped curve.
[00:51:44.630]Jeffrey Stevens: In the LIFE history of dogs and their cognitive ability so it's not surprising, given what we see in every other organism, but we were able to measure it, and that means we might be able to use it now i'm one of the tests that.
[00:51:59.330]Jeffrey Stevens: has been run both by Evan and no us neither mackler his lab is trying to use the cognition data to test between two different models of life history, one being an idea that maybe.
[00:52:15.170]Jeffrey Stevens: Maybe as dogs vary in size right everybody knows the sad thing that like big dogs don't live as long right.
[00:52:23.690]Jeffrey Stevens: So one question is our one model I sorry, is that, as a dog's body is i'm.
[00:52:31.490]Jeffrey Stevens: sorry that, as a dog's body is sunesson its mind it's the nesting to OK, so the curve here, for whatever measure of cognition we're going to be talking about it's going to map on to the curve of the dog's body so as they're.
[00:52:46.070]Jeffrey Stevens: Saying they're more like a cancer, they can't see etc, and it happens very early relative to other breeds of dogs that are smaller the mind is finessing to.
[00:52:54.470]Jeffrey Stevens: The other model is that actually their bodies sicknesses independently of their minds.
[00:52:58.520]Jeffrey Stevens: And so, nobody knew nobody ever had a data set to test this, and so they said about to do it and the finding is that actually this model was the one that was supported.
[00:53:06.620]Jeffrey Stevens: So big dogs have perfectly functioning minds as far as we know, based on the measures we have us Maybe other measures you wouldn't find that but, at least on what we measured through citizen science big dogs are perfectly capable cognitively for their age, relative to a smaller dog.
[00:53:24.170]Jeffrey Stevens: So their minds are suppressing independently of their bodies alright, so this is just to say that thinking about.
[00:53:32.990]Jeffrey Stevens: Life history and rearing could be really interesting and important Also, how do you have dogs indoor and live longer and service, how do we think if the cognition is related to their performance and training When does it CNS, how do we choose the right breed etc.
[00:53:51.260]Jeffrey Stevens: So I got really excited particularly about early life history and what early experiences might do.
[00:53:57.500]Jeffrey Stevens: And if we could look longitudinally at how some of these cognitive abilities, develop and particularly in service dogs if we could use that.
[00:54:04.970]Jeffrey Stevens: To better our predictive models that I showed you that we can make some predictions, based on their individual variability as adults.
[00:54:12.740]Jeffrey Stevens: But the holy grail, of course, is not when a dog is 18 months old and already been invested in for a year and a half or two years and is about to be trained and figure out okay.
[00:54:22.460]Jeffrey Stevens: A week before they're going to be trained that they have potential the Holy Grail is when they're you know a few months old, because now, you can either support a dog with different rearing, or you could.
[00:54:34.220]Jeffrey Stevens: Really expose a dog or or select a certain set of dogs that look like that high potential.
[00:54:40.460]Jeffrey Stevens: Okay, so we've been raising dogs on campus from canine companions it's not always easy.
[00:54:46.280]Jeffrey Stevens: This is one of our star students on your parks with I think at this time, seven dog she was taking a walk that's not normally how we do it it's a funny picture.
[00:54:53.420]Jeffrey Stevens: And as we're raising them we use cognitive tasks like a cognitive test battery much like the one.
[00:54:59.900]Jeffrey Stevens: That we did with the adult dogs and we made the puppy version, we also have temperament tests and we have measures of physiological response to a variety of novel objects and people.
[00:55:12.230]Jeffrey Stevens: All right, and in the life cycle of a service dog we're focused in the last moment of rapid brain development here between nine and 18 weeks and we have our dogs at Duke between nine and 20 and we use a BAT our battery of task I just highlighted to you.
[00:55:31.640]Jeffrey Stevens: Where we measure the cognition temperament and.
[00:55:36.110]Jeffrey Stevens: physiology and we're measuring a variety of cognitive abilities actually the puppy version of the same thing we saw mattered in adults.
[00:55:43.520]Jeffrey Stevens: And then we're comparing two different rearing strategies, one is our weird campus strategy where the puppies get little weird they interact with thousands of people in the time that they're with us literally thousands.
[00:55:56.300]Jeffrey Stevens: And they're interacting with other puppies.
[00:56:00.050]Jeffrey Stevens: And they go to dozens of novel places and novel situations and that's compared to dogs that are raised in a home that are separated eight nine weeks.
[00:56:07.250]Jeffrey Stevens: From their litter they're at in one house with one family and they meet far fewer people and go and relatively go far fewer places so think of it is great socialization versus insane crazy super socialization.
[00:56:21.860]Jeffrey Stevens: Okay, and our questions are can we better predict adult training outcomes, if we had better date longitudinal data and then is one rearing strategy of these two which kind of mimic strategies that different organizations use is one strategy better than the other alright so just to quickly.
[00:56:41.600]Jeffrey Stevens: say here because we're running out of time that just says there is individual variability.
[00:56:47.210]Jeffrey Stevens: That matters and is important and tells us something, but this is data from Emily braids work.
[00:56:52.730]Jeffrey Stevens: Together with our lab and have a maclean's lab showing that when you're young at nine weeks, and you are either high or low performer on these five different cognitive measures.
[00:57:02.720]Jeffrey Stevens: That, if you were above or below the mean performance, you also when you were 18 to 24 months age and about to be trained, you also were high or low on those same measures that are predictive of training success.
[00:57:15.230]Jeffrey Stevens: What does that mean it means that there is hope potentially that you can.
[00:57:20.000]Jeffrey Stevens: Look at young dogs and predict what their cognition and maybe training success will be when they get older here's some of the first data from our puppy kindergarten.
[00:57:28.100]Jeffrey Stevens: This is a gradual slow development they're already really good.
[00:57:32.300]Jeffrey Stevens: When we measure them for the first time and we we measure them every two weeks, and then this is one where you see really rapid development and.
[00:57:38.570]Jeffrey Stevens: Here, this is really what we were looking for is if you're going to use this task it's at 12 weeks around that point that you'd want to be measuring that to predict the future.
[00:57:47.150]Jeffrey Stevens: All right, and what about rewriting history, the summary is so far, we have no evidence that makes any difference whatsoever.
[00:57:54.800]Jeffrey Stevens: The to rear histories are maturing and showing cognitive development in an identical way alright, so let me stop there and say thank you, I really appreciate a an extra minute sorry Steve, and I mean Jeff Jeff Stevens not Steve Jeff Thank you and I look forward your questions.
[00:58:24.350]Jeffrey Stevens: Right come on up for questions.
[00:58:31.610]Jeffrey Stevens: Okay, we have one from zoom they want to know any research looking at epigenetics to explain variation in both development and behavioral outcomes, I am not aware of any off top my head in dogs certainly.
[00:58:47.480]Jeffrey Stevens: People are working on those kinds of problems with rodents where there's huge samples, and they can really raise rodents in a variety of ways, but the problem with rodents, of course, is there's less that people are skillful at measuring.
[00:59:00.740]Jeffrey Stevens: That may be relevant to things we necessarily most interested in a lot of the measurements are on sort of physical what you might call physical cognition memory, maybe inhibition although.
[00:59:13.640]Jeffrey Stevens: There are measures of empathy so I guess maybe there's hope there to look at those types of things, but I don't know of anything and dogs, no.
[00:59:21.710]Good question, though.
[00:59:25.640]Jeffrey Stevens: First, thank you so much, this is fascinating I really enjoyed it um first thing is, I know is really quick at the end.
[00:59:31.280]Jeffrey Stevens: But I found it totally like out of what I normally think that the two vastly different specializations for those dogs did really have an effect, I was already if you could just talk a little bit more about that, and why you thought that was true.
[00:59:44.750]Jeffrey Stevens: Well, thank you, yes, I appreciate that question sorry it was fast the in there um the.
[00:59:52.430]Jeffrey Stevens: This was one of those well made talks that you tack on three extra slides you're like i'm sure i'll do it um so anyway.
[00:59:59.990]Jeffrey Stevens: Yes, so I appreciate the question so all we've looked at our cognitive measures and remember, we have to rearing strategies that are both were dogs are being heavily socialized.
[01:00:10.100]Jeffrey Stevens: So I have no doubt that if you had a dog, it was deprived in some way that you would get a difference so i'm not suggesting that you can't have a dog raised where it wouldn't impact their cognition i'm not saying that at all.
[01:00:22.940]Jeffrey Stevens: i'm just the reason we chose these two methods is this is actually two different methods that are used by groups that raise dogs for work.
[01:00:30.650]Jeffrey Stevens: And there's been a lot of questions about what's the impact of the rearing and what should we do and there's almost religions around that.
[01:00:40.040]Jeffrey Stevens: what's correct and what's incorrect, and so we just wanted to ask the question will.
[01:00:44.480]Jeffrey Stevens: Can we actually measure it and it looks like, at least on our cognitive measures I don't know about our physiological measures and I don't know about our temperamental measures, but for common measures which we can most easily code and analyze.
[01:00:56.030]Jeffrey Stevens: We don't see anything of particular interest, but fitting the motivation team, the one thing that we see is their motivation to retrieve it ends up that.
[01:01:07.100]Jeffrey Stevens: The dogs raised at Duke are not particularly motivated for retrieval, which is a predictor of success and different training programs and the Homer dogs are more motivated for retrieval.
[01:01:18.950]which I think anticipates maybe temperament is going to be different.
[01:01:29.240]Jeffrey Stevens: hey Todd, thank you for sharing all that with us, I was blown away by the the finding that the dog size doesn't relate to cognitive decline over time and that they were essentially equivalent.
[01:01:45.650]regardless of size in their age.
[01:01:49.490]Jeffrey Stevens: Do you know is that a common finding across species other species as well because.
[01:01:55.580]Jeffrey Stevens: intuitively I would think larger animal or larger size, would lead to rapid decline as as the one hypothesis suggested just because of resource consumption and everything else.
[01:02:09.650]Jeffrey Stevens: Can you talk more about that yeah I mean I basically just to repeat the overall finding in your point, which is based, that the alternative hypothesis was based on cross species comparisons that's what it was based on was that hypothesis.
[01:02:22.430]Jeffrey Stevens: You know, when you look across different species largest species tend to CNS and.
[01:02:27.260]Jeffrey Stevens: You know slower actually right so larger species tend to live longer than smaller species and so dogs are sort of already weird because larger.
[01:02:36.980]Jeffrey Stevens: individuals have within the species die earlier but across species larger species usually longer, and then you see more extreme cognitive senescence and larger species as a result, so this is really super counterintuitive that you have.
[01:02:53.900]Jeffrey Stevens: You know the fact that you have the larger individuals within this species actually aren't showing cognitive decline.
[01:03:01.700]Jeffrey Stevens: And, and it wasn't just the on the extremes, it was really a great nation in terms of the effect.
[01:03:08.690]Do you think.
[01:03:11.630]Do you think there's any way to uncover what role domestication played in that and, like the.
[01:03:19.160]The way that different evolutions of dog species and have.
[01:03:26.060]Jeffrey Stevens: no idea how that comes to happen because it just seems so bizarre that that open yeah I I it's going to be a really fun problem and there's there's actually a huge.
[01:03:36.740]Jeffrey Stevens: consortium working on dog aging now and it's funded by the NIH, and this was one of the first findings that you know anticipates what they're going to be doing and and you know highlights the interest of what dogs can allow us to look at.
[01:03:51.770]Jeffrey Stevens: That other species may not be able to your question about the origin, though, if I understand you correctly, is all the modern European breeds that we are most familiar with in the United States because most dogs in the states have a European ancestry.
[01:04:07.070]Jeffrey Stevens: Those dogs are in those breeds are 150.
[01:04:12.440]Jeffrey Stevens: years old or less so, basically before that there weren't all the dogs that we are most familiar with.
[01:04:20.570]Jeffrey Stevens: So it's actually very recently that those dogs that all these different breeds have appeared, the vast majority of them.
[01:04:27.860]Jeffrey Stevens: And so it would have been over a process over the last hundred 50 years that this phenomenon appeared, and it would have been due to intentional artificial selection now whether there was intentional manipulation of that.
[01:04:41.510]Jeffrey Stevens: is another question, and that may be harder to figure out, but at least it'll be exciting for scientist to figure out what mechanistic Lee may be going on, if this replicates.
[01:04:49.670]Jeffrey Stevens: In a you know, because this was citizen science would be nice to see a replicated again and another more conventional set.
[01:04:57.320]Jeffrey Stevens: Yes, I think, my question is about experimental design, but you can advise me i'm.
[01:05:03.740]Jeffrey Stevens: Thinking about how often you repeat the tests, over time, how do you sort out the possibility that, I mean if, in the chemistry lab each time we replicate the chemicals are meeting, for the first time, all over again.
[01:05:17.540]Jeffrey Stevens: To the extent that it sounds like what is being observed as a certain kind of spontaneity of puppy solving problems, how do you sort that out from I surely not measuring learning.
[01:05:30.200]Jeffrey Stevens: Good question good question, yes, so, especially with the longitudinal approach right so usually I mean longitudinal studies are now that i'm in the middle of one it's they're difficult.
[01:05:43.820]Jeffrey Stevens: Shall we say so to have puppies for months and to repeatedly measure it's a lot of work and it's there's a reason there's not much longitudinal data because it's crazy.
[01:05:53.540]Jeffrey Stevens: So, most of our data is cross sectional if it's going to be life, history or developmental, which means that each dog has been measured once.
[01:06:01.580]Jeffrey Stevens: And so, and most of the studies were just measuring one time and comparing groups or whatever, and all the studies, I was originally showing you that that, let us hear.
[01:06:11.720]Jeffrey Stevens: Those were all we just quickly measure one one individual one time on one test and they only have that one experience generally.
[01:06:19.820]Jeffrey Stevens: But now we're doing longitudinal and you're right, we are measuring again and again five times and so statistically will have to control for that, but we also have another group of dogs.
[01:06:29.630]Jeffrey Stevens: That we are testing one time when they're the same age as our oldest dogs so there'll be our control dogs that weren't tested multiple times.
[01:06:39.410]Jeffrey Stevens: I can't say anything about them, yet, because we don't have enough of them, but but uh.
[01:06:42.890]Jeffrey Stevens: But we are aware of that interesting problem what's fun, though, is because we have the two different rearing.
[01:06:48.680]Jeffrey Stevens: they're both being measured multiple times so at the very least, if there is tremendous learning as a result of retest that will still be able to see if there's a difference there.
[01:06:59.030]Jeffrey Stevens: But the final thing is all the Games, we play their space two weeks apart and they get four repetitions maybe six and then they wait two weeks.
[01:07:09.080]Jeffrey Stevens: And so, if they are learning that's also remarkable that is amazing that with that little exposure to all these different games they're improving some significant amount so.
[01:07:21.380]Jeffrey Stevens: thanks for the question yeah it's really good.
[01:07:24.980]Jeffrey Stevens: Okay um do you think that the differences seen in social, cognition between non human primates and dogs slash humans could be attributed to the different experiences, they have with humans.
[01:07:37.520]Jeffrey Stevens: But wait say that again or that non human primates the difference between non human primates and dogs attributed to the different experiences, they have with humans yep with humans, yes um.
[01:07:48.890]Jeffrey Stevens: Yes, and no.
[01:07:52.880]Jeffrey Stevens: So.
[01:07:56.330]Jeffrey Stevens: When the when we're comparing human kids to non human apes, the nonhuman apes are generally in humans, you know captive situation so they're not wild.
[01:08:10.940]Jeffrey Stevens: And the apes for testing are extremely familiar with people, we have all sorts of motivational controls they're very interested in want to interact, they can solve a whole host of other problems that dogs can't solve and like do way better.
[01:08:27.290]Jeffrey Stevens: and
[01:08:29.360]Jeffrey Stevens: You can train great apes with lots of experience to solve these problems so with 100 trials 120 150 trials, you can have Great Ape solving the gesture.
[01:08:41.990]Jeffrey Stevens: Using a gesture, even a novel gesture, but once you train them it doesn't transfer to a new gesture so it's not just Oh, they weren't raised the same way.
[01:08:51.350]Jeffrey Stevens: there's a need for a lot of exposure and learning and that suggests they don't understand cognitively.
[01:08:59.000]Jeffrey Stevens: They don't understand the intent behind the gesture, the same way that kids do and potentially the same way that dogs do so um.
[01:09:07.280]Jeffrey Stevens: it's something we we worry about we care about we still could be wrong about that, but I don't think based on my understanding of all the.
[01:09:14.060]Jeffrey Stevens: Processes we've done to try to worry about that I don't I would not think I would be surprised if that's what it was put that way and one final thing I didn't even mention is.
[01:09:24.740]Jeffrey Stevens: You know, for instance Emily Bray and maclean's team just published this year, and last year sorry.
[01:09:30.800]Jeffrey Stevens: paper on hundreds of dog puppies trained for service and are being trained for service and at eight weeks they're already on trial one using human gestures.
[01:09:40.460]Jeffrey Stevens: And they've been interacting with people, you know as you would raising eight week nine week old puppies but no training of any kind and on trial one boom they understand.
[01:09:53.090]Jeffrey Stevens: I would say, if it is they understand that as a command they can understand the command because they can understand communicative intentions of humans that then allows them to interpret it as a command and they do that spontaneously That would be my interpretation Okay, thank you all.
[01:10:13.610]Jeffrey Stevens: Right, thank you, thank you, Dr here one quick follow up, I just want to ask is, are you still enrolling for cognition do you have thousands of.
[01:10:21.200]Jeffrey Stevens: dogs he still enrolling do you want, you can still go play cognition great okay all right great all right Thank you so much, so we will wrap up the session for now we're gonna have a lunch break we'll be back at 230 for our next speaker Dr Jeffrey cat So hopefully see you at 230.

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Is dog cognition the secret to working dog success?

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