Research in the last two decades has yielded remarkable insights into the minds of dogs. Most notably, dogs have been shown to possess a variety of human-like social skills not commonly reported in other nonhuman animals. In contrast, dogs’ abilities for reasoning about the physical world appear to be comparatively unremarkable. Despite these species-level characterizations, individual dogs vary tremendously in their behavior and cognition. Most research to date has focused on describing general features of dog cognition, and individual differences have largely been treated as ‘error variance’. In this talk Dr. Evan MacLean will describe a line of research that aims to uncover the patterns of individual differences in dog cognition, and to systematically understand these patterns in terms of variance in multiple independent cognitive constructs. He will first compare the patterns of individual differences in dogs, nonhuman apes, and human children, and discuss the implications of these data for understanding dog cognitive evolution. He will then turn to how the study of individual differences in dog cognition can be applied to real world problems to identify dogs well matched to various working roles (e.g. assistance dogs, explosive detection dogs). The first ‘live’ online presentation will be held on May 4th at 8:00pm EST. A question and answer session will follow moderated by Monique Udell, PhD.

Sponsor:E-training for Dogs
Speaker(s):Evan MacLean, PhD (Monique Udell, PhD Moderator)

Contact: Cheryl Asmus
 Email: cheryl@e-trainingfordogs.com
 Phone: 970-231-9965
 Web: http://e-trainingfordogs.com/2011/03/the-library/