So in this lecture, we're gonna look at breed differences in cognition. It's probably the question I get asked the most when I'm interviewed by reporters or when I meet people. People are absolutely fascinated by the question of whether there are really systematic differences in how breeds solve problems cognitively. So for this what's gonna be most useful from The Genius of Dogs, if you're following along, if you've decided to do that, is gonna be chapter 9. And Dognition, actually all these exercises are gonna be interesting. Of course, but it's communication and memory, that I think are going to be most relevant here that will be fun laboratory exercises and it will become apparent as I tell you what we've discovered. What really best describes your dog's mind? I think lots of people think it's breed. When you ask people, is my dog smart or is my dog not smart, they often bring up immediately, the breed of their dog. Oh, my dog is a toy dog, so not so smart. My dog is a sporting breed. My dog is a herding breed. People have different ideas about what those dogs are particularly talented at in terms of solving problems. But what I'd like to propose to you, based on the data that we've collected through Dognition, our citizen science project, is that breed doesn't really doesn't communicate that much. And that actually if we just describe a dog not based on their breed, but based on their actual cognitive profile, it's gonna be a much better way to understand your dog as an individual. So let me give you some examples of data that we have collected looking at the five different types of intelligence, empathy, communication, cunning, memory and reasoning where we compare breeds and we also then compare different cognitive profiles. This is an example of data that compares sporting breeds to herding breeds. The sporting breeds are represented by the white area on the figure. Basically, the higher level that you see above the x-axis or the line on the horizon is sort of the skill level that any group of dogs, or the amount of dogs that show a certain amount of skill level. So basically, what you see there is that the white area really goes up high when it comes to being bonded, and most sporting dogs tend to be very strongly bonded, based on the games that citizens and scientists have played with their dogs using Dognition. But if you also look at the herding breeds, well, the herding breeds are represented by the dotted line. It's very similar. And if you walk down each of the dimensions that we think are really important measures of cognition, you'll see that really, there's a lot of overlap. There's really not much that's different between sporting breeds and herding breeds, even though, obviously, we think about those different groups of dogs being bred for very different activities. When they were originally created, to do the different jobs that they're famous for doing. What happens when we use the cognitive profiles generated by Dognition? Well, things change remarkably. What you see is that dogs that come out as stargazers look very, very different than dogs that come out with a cognitive profile of an ace on the measures of being bonded. Stargazers tend to be more individualistic, whereas aces tend to be more bonded. The stargazer represented, again, by the white area, and the aces by the dotted line. And you can go through each dimension just like that. You can see, for instance, that stargazers are not as reliant on communication, or as collaborative as aces are. And you can go down each dimension and see the same very large magnitude of difference between these two groups of dogs. So, this just shows, first of all, the power of citizen science, potentially, to discover how breed groups in this case are solving problems, potentially similarly or different from one another, and we don't see big differences between the different breed groups. >> Versus our cognitive profiles that really describe and place a dog together with the dogs or the group of dogs that perform most similarly to it cognitively.
