CogniDog - Novel multidiciplinary approach to canine cognition and affective states

Outi Vainio, Sanni Somppi, Heini Törnqvist, Laura Hänninen, Christina Krause

• Department of Equine and Small Animal Medicine, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine
• Cognitive Science Unit, Faculty of  Behavioural Sciences

The domestic dog is a unique animal model in comparative cognition research. Recent behavioral studies have shown special cognitive skills in dogs that have not been found in other canine species or nonhuman primates. Dogs are sensitive to human communicative, attentive and emotional cues and they have human-like abilities for visual categorizing and forming representations.

 

At the current multidisciplinary research project funded by The Academy of Finland, the cognitive abilities of dogs are examined with an eye movement tracking and a non-invasive electroencephalogram (EEG), the methods widely used in cognitive psychology allow comparison to human results. Visual and auditory paradigms are established to illustrate cognitive processes such as perception, memory and affective states of domestic dogs. Both EEG recording and eye movement tracking have been successfully performed on dogs resulting in promising findings.

The research results will be useful for the wide community of the researchers; not only the field of animal welfare and comparative cognition research but also expanding understanding about the evolution of cognitive skills of humans, behavioral genetics and modeling cognitive disorders.

• Dogs Do Look at Images! (Brochure in PDF-format)