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Do you believe in dog? 2016

Showing posts with label cognition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cognition. Show all posts

30 May 2018

Free canine science event, June 1-3: Live streaming world wide! #SPARCS18

Free canine science event, June 1-3: Live streaming world wide! #SPARCS18



It’s Baaack! 

You may remember us talking about the SPARCS conference in 2013, 2014, and 2015. After a 2-year hiatus, it’s baaack! And people who care about dogs all around the world are pretty much losing it with excitement (like on the SPARCS Facebook page!).

SPARCS, which stands for the Society for the Promotion of Applied Research in Canine Science, has been at the forefront of connecting dog lovers to canine science via a free, live streaming conference that actively brings dog people into the conversation #SPARCS18! 

SPARCS returns for 2018, this Friday, Saturday and Sunday, June 1 - 3. This time, it’s all about what’s underneath: canine behavioral genetics. Six canine researchers, behavioral veterinarians, and geneticists bring us ‘The Real Dog: What We Know & What We Don’t (Yet).’

#SPARCS18 speakers and science hosts!
We’re incredibly excited to join SPARCS for the third year as science hosts. The conferences is live streaming from New York's Hudson Valley (EDT), and is now presented by The National Canine Research Council. As we prepare for the conference, here’s what you should know about watching and engaging live, and even how to watch later.


Watch live: 4th SPARCS conference website
June 1 - 3, 2018
9:30am - 5:15pm (EDT)
Each day features two speakers, post-talk Q&A, and an end-of-day group panel discussion 4:30pm - 5:15pm

Friday, June 1
Ádám Miklósi and Kristopher Irizarry kick us off with the evolution of dogs’ close relationship with humans.


Saturday, June 2
Claire Wade and Elinor Karlsson introduce the amazingly complex relationship between genomics and behavior, which in recent years has been clarified with the help of citizen science.


Sunday, June 3
Kelly Ballantyne and Jessica Hekman wrap it up and get really real about the impact of behavioral genetics on dog relationships with humans and the important recognition that genetics don’t necessarily mean predestination.


Get social: Pose questions and comments for speaker Q&As and daily panel discussions. This live streaming conference is anything but passive — unless that’s what you want, in which case sit back in your pajamas and relax! After each talk, we (Mia and Julie of Do You Believe in Dog?) will hold speaker Q&A sessions, and our questions (we hope!) will be your questions! 

Share questions or comments over Twitter DYBID using #SPARCS18, and feel free to post on the Do You Believe in Dog Facebook page too. Remember, SPARCS is also on Facebook and Twitter. 

Watch later: All presentations and panel discussions will be recorded and posted to the SPARCS website following the conference. 

Watch the past: As mentioned, this is the 4th SPARCS conference, and past presentations, speaker interviews, and panel discussions are available, right now, for free, on the SPARCS website. Hear from Marc Bekoff, Michael Fox, Clive Wynne, Ádám Miklósi, Ray Coppinger, James Serpell, Simon Gadbois, Monique Udell, Alexandra Horowitz, Kathryn Lord, Patricia McConnell, Stephen Zawistowski, Michael Hennessey, Bonne Beerda, James Ha, Hal Herzog, Márta Gácsi and others anytime you like. 
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23 February 2016

Dog Researchers Head to the City by the Bay: The Canine Science Symposium in San Francisco, CA

Dog Researchers Head to the City by the Bay: The Canine Science Symposium in San Francisco, CA

Hi Julie & Mia,

I wanted to write to the two of you about the Canine Science Symposium. It's happening this April 16 & 17 in San Francisco, and I thought you might be interested to hear all about it. I bet Julie remembers speaking about anthropomorphism at the very first CSS. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get her back to San Francisco for the next one!

This year's Symposium promises to be bigger and better with an extra half day of presentations, more speakers and new breakout sessions to dig deeper into the research. Three years later since that inaugural Symposium at Pawsitive Tails, we're now at the San Francisco SPCA where we’ve partnered with the organization’s Behavior & Training Department, brought on sponsors (such as the Karen Pyror Academy) and in all, expect well over 100 shelter staff and volunteers, trainers and dog enthusiasts to join us for this day and a half of canine science. We love coming to San Francisco in part because of the vibrant dog community there!

While many Symposium speakers continue to return each year to share their research, we ensure that the topics are new – and we’re real sticklers on the “applied” part of the research. We want those that come out to learn with us to be able to walk away with new techniques and approaches to try in their interactions with shelter dogs, dogs that they train and the dogs they live with. 

This year’s addition of breakout sessions will provide more advanced content (something we think the Symposium crowd is eager for) and live opportunities to discuss research and training ideas (and in some cases, as they’re happening!). We like sharing our enthusiasm for dogs, and the Symposium is our opportunity to make our research accessible.
Xephos running the maze at ASU.
Our CSS speakers for 2016 include Drs. Clive Wynne (Arizona State University), Erica Feuerbacher (Carroll College), Lindsay Mehrkam (Oregon State University), Sasha Protopopova  (Texas Tech University) and myself. This year, we have new additions to our speaking roster including Dr. Monique Udell from Oregon State University and post-doctoral scholar Dr. Nathan Hall from Arizona State University. Dr. Jeannine Berger, who heads up the SF/SPCA’s Behavior Resources, will be speaking too (in the past, she’s led our roundtable, but now she’s joining us at the podium).

While many of us are former or current students of Clive’s, our research interests are diverse as evidenced by this year’s topics. Our presentations include decoding dominance in dogs; canine sociability and attachment; using advanced behavioral principles in dog training; applying cognitive, behavioral and physiological measures to improve shelter dog welfare; using play as training and enrichment; understanding visitor behavior in shelters to increase adoptions; exploring canine olfaction and interpreting canine body language.

We’re excited to return to San Francisco this April and hope to see many in the dog training and behavior community at the Symposium! 

For those folks that are interested in attending, head on over to https://www.sfspca.org/get-involved/events/CSS2016 for all the details including speaker bios and presentation descriptions, and online registration (registration is at the waaaay bottom of the page).

Our early-bird registration ends March 2nd, so those that want to attend should sign up soon!  

Lisa Gunter 
MA, CBCC-KA, CPDT-KA
Canine Science Collaboratory, Arizona State University

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9 March 2015

How dogs get the point: what enables canines to interpret human gestures?

How dogs get the point: what enables canines to interpret human gestures?

Guest post by: Lucia Lazarowski, PhD candidate. Her research is available via free promotional access in the journal Behavioural Processes until February, 2016.

 Hi Mia and Julie,

As a long-time fan of the blog, it is an honor to be a guest contributor! I am especially excited to tell DYBID readers about this research because it was somewhat of a pet project (pun intended). I am now a PhD student at Auburn University, but this study was done while I was working at North Carolina State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine. At NCSU, I worked with a team of veterinarians and animal behaviorists on a several projects aimed at improving selection and training of military working dogs, and I was primarily involved with studies related to explosives detection. 
Meanwhile in the canine cognition world, a hot topic was that of dogs’ ability to follow human gestures. Several studies have demonstrated that dogs are able to use human gestures, like pointing, to find hidden treats. An interesting finding that fueled a lot of the research in this area is that dogs perform better on these tasks than chimpanzees, our closest relatives, and wolves, dogs’ closest relatives. Is it possible that dogs are able to read and use human gestures because they co-evolved with humans, endowing them with a specialized human-like type of social cognition that their ancestors missed out on? Or, is it that dogs are such an integrated part of our lives that through our daily interactions they learn that paying attention to our body language pays off?

These two viewpoints have sparked a heated debate among canine scientists. In order to tease apart the roles of domestication and experience (or the nature/nurture debate, as your high school psychology teacher would call it), researchers have tested canines of different species (domesticated and wild-type) and different life histories (human-reared and feral). The domestication hypothesis, which suggests that point-following is an innate skill that dogs have acquired in a case of convergent evolution with humans, predicts that domestication alone is sufficient for point-following. The learning hypothesis, on the other hand, contends that dogs must learn through experience to follow human gestures, regardless of domestication status. 

 The fact that chimps and wolves do not appear to utilize human pointing as dogs do seems to support domestication as an explanation. But, (plot twist!) if wolves are raised with humans from an early age and are tested in appropriate conditions, they can perform as well or even better than dogs.  To recap, groups that have succeeded at human pointing tasks include canines that are domesticated and socialized (pet dogs), non-domesticated and un-socialized (wolves), and non-domesticated and socialized (hand-reared wolves).  Hopefully at this point the missing piece of the puzzle is obvious: what about domestic dogs that have not been heavily exposed to humans? This vital yet untested sub-group of canines would help tip the scales in the domestication vs. experience debate.

At NCSU, we were gearing up to begin a new study investigating factors related to olfactory learning in canine explosives detection. The dogs acquired for this study were mixed-breed males around 1 year old, and unlike our previous studies which used trained military working dogs, these were laboratory-reared dogs. It occurred to me that this would be the perfect opportunity to test a group of dogs that met all of the proposed criteria for the “missing link”: laboratory dogs lack the same experiences that pet dogs living in human homes have (including the possibly critical opportunity to learn about human gestures), but they are socialized to humans at an early age and thus not fearful like feral dogs may be. Another bonus is that their life histories are known and documented, unlike dogs found in a shelter that at some point may have lived with people. If the opportunity to learn about human gestures is critical for point-following behavior to develop and not just domestication alone, these dogs would be expected to perform worse than pet dogs on point-following tasks. 





We tested 11 laboratory dogs and 9 pet dogs using methods established in previous studies in which dogs watched as humans performed two types of point (“easy” and “hard”, for simplicity’s sake).  What we found was that while pet dogs followed the harder point to the correct container significantly higher than chance, the laboratory dogs did not. Both groups of dogs were able to locate the correct container using the easier point, demonstrating that any failures were not due methodological flaws or to an inability to perform the demands of the task (note that success on these easier point trials can be explained by simpler mechanisms like physical proximity to the container).
 
Our results seem to suggest that exposure to humans and the opportunity to learn about the meanings of gestures plays an important role in dogs’ ability to follow pointing. 

 Interestingly, a few dogs in the pet group performed just as poorly as the laboratory dogs, which would lend further support to the idea that individual experiences shape these abilities. Further, failures by the laboratory dogs are not likely caused by cognitive deficits due to an impoverished environment; the dogs received environmental enrichment including daily interactions with kennel and research staff, play-time with conspecifics, outdoor exercise, and a variety of toys (and after completing this experiment, participated in daily socialization and reward-based training sessions to facilitate future adoptions). Though domestication may likely contribute to dogs’ gesture-reading skills, specific life experiences may also be critical for their manifestation. 

P.S.: A happily-ever-after to this story: one of the subjects from this cohort, ‘Captain’, was adopted upon completion of the studies... by me! 

Lucia and Captain - all smiles!

Author
Lucia Lazarowski is a PhD student at Auburn University in the Comparative Cognition Laboratory. They collaborate with the Canine Performance Sciences program at Auburn University (Facebook).

If you found this interesting, you may also enjoy our guest post by Dr Bradley Smith: Take a walk on the wild side: Dingo science, or see all of our guest contributors.

 Images: Copyright Lucia Lazarowski. 

References:
Lazarowski L. (2015). A comparison of pet and purpose-bred research dog (Canis familiaris) performance on human-guided object-choice tasks, Behavioural Processes, 110 60-67. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2014.09.021 [OPEN ACCESS until Feb 2016]

 Kaminski, J., Nitzschner, M., 2013. Do dogs get the point? A review of dog-human communication ability. Learn Motiv. 44 (4), 294–302.

Udell, M.A.R., Dorey, N.R., Wynne, C.D.L., 2010. What did domestication do to dogs? A new account of dogs’ sensitivity to human actions. Biol Rev. 85 (2), 327–345.

 Reid, P., 2009. Adapting to the human world: Dogs’ responsiveness to our social cues. Behav Process. 80 (3), 325–333. 

 © 2015 Lucia Lazarowski | Do You Believe in Dog?
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27 March 2014

Do As I Do: Copy Cat Social Imitation in Dog Training

Do As I Do: Copy Cat Social Imitation in Dog Training

Join us for another guest post, this time from Claudia Fugazza of the Family Dog Project in Budapest. Claudia's here to discuss her recent publication in Applied Animal Behaviour Science on the efficiency of new methods in dog training.

Hi Mia and Julie,

Formal training methods used until now rely mainly on the well-known rules of individual associative learning. These methods work perfectly well for a very wide range of animals — pigeons, rats, dogs and even crabs — and human and non-human animals can learn by ‘click and treat,’ as noted in the popular training book by Karen Pryor.

However, recent research has found substantial evidence that dogs could be predisposed to acquire information socially via the ‘Do as I do’ method. Do as I Do is a relatively new training method for people to use, based on dogs’ social cognitive skills, particularly on their imitative ability. 
With this training technique, dogs learn new behaviors by observing and copying their handler. The dog is a copycat. This method relies on social learning, and it was recently introduced in the applied field of dog training. 




As this method has started spreading in the dog training world, we felt that its efficiency and efficacy needed scientific testing. We were also wanting to know whether this method would be more or less efficient than other current training methods in training for particular behaviors.

We expected that dogs would more easily copy object-related actions from a human demonstrator so we tested dogs’ efficiency in this kind of tasks. To do this, I travelled across Italy and the UK with my video-cameras as well as a heavy Ikea cabinet filled with objects (you can imagine the weird looks I got from security personal at checkpoints!). I used these objects to test dogs learning to open or close drawers and lockers, pick up items from it etc. Since training methods can be affected by the skills of the trainer, only experienced dog-owners pairs who achieved a certificate either for the ‘Do as I do’ method or for shaping / clicker training were included in the study. Each pair was tested using ‘his’ method for teaching three different object-related actions in three testing sessions.


 We expected that the ‘Do as I do’ method would prove more efficient for teaching complex tasks, compared to the shaping method that relies on individual learning. This expectation comes from what we know in humans: we tend to rely more on social learning when required to learn something difficult.

Our research found that the ‘Do as I do’ method proved more efficient for teaching dogs complex tasks, like close a drawer, open a locker and pick up an item that was inside (i.e., the time needed by the owner to obtain the first correct performance of the predetermined action was shorter with the ‘Do as I do’ method compared to shaping). We did not find a significant difference in the efficiency of the methods for teaching dogs simple tasks like knocking over a bottle or ringing a bell.

Now that we know a bit more on how to efficiently teach complex object-related actions, we are curious to know what happens when we want to teach different kind of complex actions, like body movements. We also want to know whether introducing social learning in dog training could have an effect on learning cues for trained action. 

We are aware that learning rates can be influenced by many factors, and we acknowledge that this study is just a very first step towards a more scientific approach to training paradigms. However we believe that this kind of information can be very important for the practitioners working in the applied field of dog training. We hope that the readers will not misinterpret the results and will not extend them to different actions and situations that were not tested.

Furthermore we would like to emphasize that, despite being efficient for training some kinds of actions, the ‘Do as I do’ method does not replace the methods based on individual learning (for example think of how many actions are not imitable at all if the demonstrator is a human and the learner is a dog!). Instead ‘Do as I do’ is a useful (and fun!) addition to existing training paradigms. Experienced dog trainers may find effective ways to mix the different training techniques in order to obtain the best results with each dog. 

Claudia Fugazza
Do as I Do Book and DVD
http://www.apprendimentosociale.it/en/claudia-fugazza/
Family Dog Project 

 Reference 
Fugazza C. & Miklósi Á. (2014). Should old dog trainers learn new tricks? The efficiency of the Do as I do method and shaping/clicker training method to train dogs, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 153 53-61. DOI:

© Do You Believe in Dog? 2014
 p.s. Check out this dog's excellent jump!



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