MIAMI: A new study shows that ordinary dog owners can conduct experiments in canine cognition. Dog owners successfully replicated studies conducted by trained scientists, and the results match.
Researchers engaged over 500 dog owners and their dogs online, via Dognition, a private startup designed to help dog owners learn more about their individual dog through games.
First, researchers had to test the games. They started with 20 different tasks for the initial cognitive assessment on the site. Only 10 of those games made it to the final version, with tweaks along the way.
Some games were tossed out because instructions were too difficult to ensure uniformity while others were not engaging enough.
Researchers have already found a new hypothesis in their dog-owner-generated data.
“Dogs have different types of intelligence. This new data is helping researchers identify three or four different intelligence domains in dogs,” said …