Everything you wanted to know, but were afraid to ask, about dog IQ.
Researchers from the University of Helsinki assessed the cognitive abilities of over 1,000 dogs from 13 breeds with ten tests. Border Collies scored at or near the top in social cognition, inhibitory control, and spatial problem-solving ability, while Labrador Retrievers scored near the bottom. While prior research has shown that a dog's breed isn't as predictive of its personality and behavior as many think, the present study suggests that there are noteworthy differences in certain cognitive abilities.Researchers at the University of Helsinki in Finland put over 1,000 dogs from 13 distinct breeds through a battery of cognitive tests in perhaps the largest laboratory study of canine intelligence ever conducted.Their findings were recently published in the journal Scientific Reports.
(Source)
The paper and its abstract are as follows:
The extraordinary genetic and behavioural diversity of dog breeds provides a unique opportunity for investigating the heritability of cognitive traits, such as problem-solving ability, social cognition, inhibitory control, and memory. Previous studies have mainly investigated cognitive differences between breed groups, and information on individual dog breeds is scarce. As a result, findings are often contradictory and inconsistent. The aim of this study was to provide more clarity on between-breed differences of cognitive traits in dogs.
We examined the performance of 13 dog breeds (N = 1002 dogs) in a standardized test battery. Significant breed differences were found for understanding of human communicative gestures, following a human’s misleading gesture, spatial problem-solving ability in a V-detour task, inhibitory control in a cylinder test, and persistence and human-directed behaviour during an unsolvable task. Breeds also differed significantly in their behaviour towards an unfamiliar person, activity level, and exploration of a novel environment. No significant differences were identified in tasks measuring memory or logical reasoning.
Breed differences thus emerged mainly in tasks measuring social cognition, problem-solving, and inhibitory control. Our results suggest that these traits may have come under diversifying artificial selection in different breeds. These results provide a deeper understanding on breed-specific traits in dogs.
Saara Junttila, et al., "Breed differences in social cognition, inhibitory control, and spatial problem-solving ability in the domestic dog (Canis familiaris)" 12 Sci Rep 22529 (December 29, 2022) (Open access). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-26991-5
3 comments:
Border Collies scored at or near the top in social cognition, inhibitory control, and spatial problem-solving ability, while Labrador Retrievers scored near the bottom.
really ? Labrador Retrievers scored near the bottom.? not my experience
applied for race and iq?
I personally think dogs are for soup, so I have little personal experience to evaluate the results myself.
I've written about race v. IQ before and have no interest in discussing it again now. You can search by the IQ tag if you want to find previous posts at this blog on topic.
For example, one previous post of mine states:
"A lot of perceived racial differences in the U.S. are products of historical immigration policies, and of the history of the slave trade and the Jim Crow regimes that followed. More generally, almost all U.S. immigrant populations are highly atypical of the populations of their homelands in multiple ways."
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