Mary Allen
Age has its pitfalls. Even with dogs. Among other things, it has an impact on learning, as a new study by the Vetmeduni Vienna confirms.
You can not teach old dogs new tricks. Or: You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. And that’s the case. Aging has an impact on learning not only in humans but also in dogs, as a study by the Clever Dog Lab of the Messerli Research Institute at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna has now confirmed.
Test With Touch Screen
Lisa Wallis and Friederike Range from the Messerli Research Institute examined 95 Border Collies between the ages of five months and 13 years. “Border Collies have a reputation for being particularly quick learners. They have been bred for generations for traits important for herding sheep. In recent years they have also become popular pet dogs, probably due to their ease of training. For this reason, we had enough test animals available for this breed,” explains study director Friederike Range in a broadcast.
The dogs were divided into five age groups and underwent four different tests. The tasks were structured in such a way that three cognitive abilities could be tested: learning ability, logical reasoning, and memory.
There were differences in cognitive performance depending on the age of the dogs. In the first part, the animals had to learn to correctly select four out of a total of eight abstract images on a touchscreen. For this purpose, they were presented with two images on the screen. One picture had a positive connotation – so there was a food reward for nudging this picture. The second picture had a negative connotation – here there was no threat for the nudge but a time-out. The four “positive” images were presented in different combinations with the four “negative” images.
“Older dogs needed more attempts before they got the task right than younger dogs. It also showed that older dogs are less flexible in their mindsets than younger ones. As with humans, older dogs find it more difficult to change what they are used to or what they have learned,” explains the study’s first author, Lisa Wallis.
Master of Logical Thinking
In another test, the Border Collies, in turn, two images are presented on the touchscreen. This time, however, one of the images was always new to the animals. They already knew the other from the first test and were able to classify it as “wrong”. The dogs now had to draw logical conclusions. They had previously learned that one of the two presented images must always be classified as positive and the other as negative. In the test, they only knew the negative image. The other, new and unknown image, therefore, had to be positively documented. The dogs had to choose according to the exclusion principle. “As dogs got older, they performed better on this task, while younger dogs failed to do the task. This is probably because the older dogs were more persistent and less flexible than the younger animals,” says Range.
Good Long Term Memory
Six months after the first learning tests, the researchers repeated the touch-screen logical reasoning experiments with all the dogs. There were no significant age differences here. The study results could be used, for example, to develop tests that can be used to measure cognitive development and, above all, aging in dogs. Certain deficits could be recognized early and treated accordingly.