Dognition - Find The Genius In Your Dog - www.dognition.com

Going online to really get to know your dog

Dognition lets you evaluate your pet’s empathy, memory, cunning, communication, and reasoning. But no IQ ratings — at least yet.

By Ilene Raymond Rush FOR THE INQUIRER

The writer’s dog scored as empathetic.

Lena Provoost, an animal behavior resident veterinarian at Penn Vet, learned that Savannah is “wily.” Penn Vet

Armed with treats, paper cups, and sticky notes, my husband and I recently put our schnauzer through a battery of cognition games to determine exactly who had been sharing our home for 13 years.

Living with Noodle for that long, I do know certain things. Such as how she’ll do anything for a dried chicken strip. But how she feels about me or my husband, how she interacts with her environment, or how she solves problems has been pretty much anyone’s guess.

Enter Dognition (www.dognition.com), a website that promises to “find the genius in your dog.” For $19 — more if you decide to go with a yearly plan — you can evaluate your dog’s empathy, memory, cunning, communication, and reasoning.

At the end, you receive a comprehensive and individual evaluation of your dog’s scores, along with a comparison of where your dog stands in relation to other dogs whose humans have signed them on to play the games.

So far, about 25,000 people have put their dogs through the program, with the collected data from these “citizen-scientists” going back to the Duke Canine Cognition Center at Duke University, to be shared and studied by dog experts around the world. The tests were designed based on scientific literature on areas that “we think dogs are going to be using in their everyday life, and helps to define how they operate,” says Brian Hare, director of the center and designer of the games. Yale and Arizona State also evaluate dog cognition, but require dogs to visit the campus.

The popularity of the online site doesn’t surprise Hare.

“We want to know what our dogs are thinking, how they feel about us, and if they are thinking about us,” says Hare. “We have a deep need to understand this family member.”

Part of that fascination stems from how our ideas about dogs have evolved over the years, says Lena Provoost, an animal behavior resident veterinarian at Penn Vet.

While once we boarded dogs in the backyard, “now we see our pets as fur children,” says Provoost. “They sleep in our beds. We want to know how they think and why they do what they do.”

But the games won’t determine your dog’s IQ.

“There are no smart or not smart dogs,” says Hare, “but there are dogs with cognitive profiles that will give different results.”

Despite some popular reports that rank the intelligence of various breeds, Hare notes that none of that information was based on scientific studies. Data collected from the Dognition project, however, may eventually determine whether such differences exist.

The tests are fairly simple. In one to establish communication skills, Noodle was tasked to respond to a foot motion toward a concealed treat, rather than a more familiar hand signal. Another, designed to measure Noodle’s caginess, had me hide my eyes while she was given free rein to “steal” a treat.

For Noodle, some of the tests proved a trial, while others were a breeze. More interesting, however, was the chance the program gave to predict, before playing a game, how I thought she might perform. For instance, my rather standoffish dog, who doesn’t take to strangers, ranked extremely high in empathy, holding my gaze for close to 90 seconds in one game. And while she wasn’t considered wily — when I covered my eyes she didn’t steal food — she did demonstrate a good understanding of the physical world that surprised me.

Provoost notes that one sidelight of such cognitive tests is how they can promote bonds between the pet owner and the dog.

“In our service we see a lot of broken human-animal bonds with patients who have behavior issues and owners who are at their wit’s end with what they can do,” she says. “Knowing a dog’s individual cognition can help owners see that they don’t have a good or bad dog but simply that, “this is how my dog thinks.”

“For some owners, it can help them understand why their dogs might do certain things or how a dog might feel in certain circumstances,” says Provoost, who is currently testing her dog Savannah, an American Staffordshire terrier and vizsla mix. According to Savannah’s Dognition tests so far, she is 100 percent bonded with Provoost, shows average communication skills, and leans toward “wily.”

Aside from owners getting to know their canines better, Provoost sees some practical applications for cognitive tests.

“In shelter settings, I can see running dogs through a battery of assessments — it’s done to some extent now, but these games might be more substantial — in matching owners based on how a pet will behave,” Provoost says.

Veterinarians may also employ cognitive evaluations to identify pets that exhibit signs of cognitive decline or to pinpoint cognitive deficits connected with various health disorders.

Hare says the information can also inform how you approach training, by knowing your dog’s strengths and weaknesses or what your dog enjoys or doesn’t enjoy.

“If you find in the memory game that a dog doesn’t rely on working memory and isn’t very cunning, and he doesn’t stay on command, you might say he isn’t being disobedient, he simply forgets,” says Hare.

In the end, Noodle was deemed a “protodog” akin to the early wolves that began their first relationship with human beings. While light on skills that involved independent problem solving, she was seen to have a desire to connect and communicate with us.

As long as we keep the chicken strips coming. mice30@comcast.net