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You can use Dognition as your laboratory.
So what is Dognition.
Dognition is a citizen science company.
And what that means is we have taken the best games that have been
published over the last decade or so to measure the internal processes,
the different types of intelligence that dogs have,
that are relevant to their flexible problem solving, and in some cases,
their ability to infer the solution to problems they've never seen before.
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And it is applying all of those games, not to a population of dogs, but to your dog.
And to try to help you understand your dog better, and
by playing those games with your dog, the reason it's a citizen science project,
is because your data goes into a larger database that's gonna let us
answer a lot of questions that we could not answer any other way.
Because as great as, for instance, my center is at Duke,
we can only test a few hundred dogs a year.
Dognition, though, with everybody who has a dog playing, we get so
much data that we have the ability to answer a bunch of questions that you and
I would love to know the answer to.
Is a Chihuahua have better memory than a Great Dane?
Is it that a young dog somehow
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is unable to solve problems using communication that older dogs can?
Do older dogs have memory problems and when would you know?
All of these things are crucially important to your dog,
my dog, but really, there's no better way to answer those questions than you and
me going out and finding about our own dog, so
that we can learn about all dogs through citizen science.
It wasn't just me that put this together,
it was a lot of the best animal cognition experts in the world.
People like Adam Miklosi.
Who runs the, really the premier dog cognition research group in Hungary.
Richard Wrangham, who is a expert on human evolution, but also domestication.
Juliane Kamiski, who's at Portsmouth University in Britain,
who also has a center studying dog psychology and
has made some amazing discoveries about dogs making, using inference, actually.
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the director of the Mozpong Institute of Revolutionary Anthropologies,
A grade-A research, but also their dog cognition center.
Again, has really one of the world's top experts on animal cognition.
Finally, Dr. Laurie Santos who's at Yale University and
runs the Yale Canine Cognition Center and
knows a lot about how different animals solve different problems.
So they, together with me, came up the idea, can we take some of the best
games that are in the literature, and make it so that anybody can play them.
They don't have to come to Duke, they don't have to go to Yale, they don't have
to go to Hungary, they don't have to go to Portsmouth to play these games.
They can play them in their home with their own dog which means any dog in
the world can play Dognition.
So here's what we came up with, there are five sets of games and
there are ten games in total that you can play.
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And all of these games are based on the published literature.
What I mean by that is, that scientists have done research, they have submitted
that work for publication, it's been reviewed by other scientists, and
it was accepted into a peer reviewed scientific journal.
And has potentially even been replicated, meaning somebody took that same study,
did it again, and went through that same process.
When you do that, then you know that you really got something that's real.
So we took games, these 10 games that had all been through that process.
But we then came up with a way where people at home, with no equipment,
and just with your regular old dog with no training could play those games and
really learn a lot about how their dog thinks.
So you have the yawn game.
You have the eye contact game.
You have arm pointing, foot pointing, the watching, turn your back, cover your eyes,
memory versus pointing, memory versus smell, the delayed cup game, inferential
reasoning, physical reasoning game, that make up the Dognition experience.
And what you'll get when you play Dognition on the website, and of course,
you can do the first two games for free because you're taking this MOOC
is you'll get videos that give you instructions to a game, like this.
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Place a treat inside the container and then close the lid.
Make sure the lid is on firmly.
Then, place the container on the ground in front of your dog,
but this time, do not open it.
Stand up and step back so that you and your partner are standing behind your dog.
Then have your partner hit start.
If at any point your dog turns back and
looks at you or your partner making eye contact for
a full count of one one thousand, have your partner hit the look button.
This will end the trial.
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Then open the container and allow your dog to eat the treat.
>> Good girl, CiSue.
>> If after 45 seconds your dog has not looked back at you,
then regardless of what your dog is doing now.
>> Time >> Walk to the container and open it.
Allowing the dog to eat the treat.
Good boy, Finn.
That's a good boy.
>> You and your dog will do this game a total of four times.
Brian HareAssociate Professor
