ArticleLearning & behavior2018
Effect of age on discrimination learning, reversal learning, and cognitive bias in family dogs.
Article in Learning & behavior, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 60 citations in OpenAlex.
- A systematic review on the effect of individual characteristics and management practices on equine cognition.Animal cognition · 2025Pooled it
- Sex-stratified immune patterns across the canine lifespan and short-term responses to geroprotective interventions.Biogerontology · 2026Article
- Changes in cognitive performance following repeated exposure to a hand-touch learning task across breed clades of domestic dogs (Canis familiaris).Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Repeated Task Exposure and Sufficient Sleep May Mitigate ADHD-Related Cognitive Flexibility Impairments in Family Dogs.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Sound quality impacts dogs' ability to recognize and respond to playback words.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Characterizing dog cognitive aging using spontaneous problem-solving measures: development of a battery of tests from the Dog Aging Project.GeroScience · 2025Article
- Article
- Exploring the impact of a brief positive experience on dogs' performance and stress resilience during a learning task.PloS one · 2025Article
- Age-related effects on a hierarchical structure of canine cognition.GeroScience · 2024Article
- The behavioural effect of short-term cognitive and physical intervention therapies in old dogs.GeroScience · 2024Article
- Exploring breed differences in discrimination, reversal learning, and resistance to extinction in the domestic dog (Canis familiaris).Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Age Three: Milestone in the Development of Cognitive Flexibility.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Do dogs preferentially encode the identity of the target object or the location of others' actions?Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Cognitive and sensory capacity each contribute to the canine spatial bias.Ethology : formerly Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie · 2024Article
- The Relationship between Signs of Medical Conditions and Cognitive Decline in Senior Dogs.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- The effect of repeated testing on judgement bias in domestic dogs (Canis familiaris).Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Investigating responses to object-labels in the domestic dog (Canis familiaris).Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Influence of reward and location on dogs' behaviour toward an interactive artificial agent.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Smart sharks: a review of chondrichthyan cognition.Animal cognition · 2023Review
- Evaluation of Two Practical Tools to Assess Cognitive Impairment in Aged Dogs.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Several studies on age-related cognitive decline in dogs involve laboratory dogs and prolonged training. We developed two spatial tasks that required a single 1-h session. We tested 107 medium-large sized dogs: "young" (N=41, aged 2.5-6.5 years) and "old" (N=66, aged 8-14.5 years). Our results indicated that, in a discrimination learning task and in a reversal learning task, young dogs learned significantly faster than the old dogs, indicating that these two tasks could successfully be used to investigate differences in spatial learning between young and old dogs. We also provide two novel findings. First, in the reversal learning, the dogs trained based on the location of stimuli learned faster than the dogs trained based on stimulus characteristics. Most old dogs did not learn the task within our cut-off of 50 trials. Training based on an object's location is therefore more appropriate for reversal learning tasks. Second, the contrast between the response to the positive and negative stimuli was narrower in old dogs, compared to young dogs, during the reversal learning task, as well as the cognitive bias test. This measure favors comparability between tasks and between studies. Following the cognitive bias test, we could not find any indication of differences in the positive and negative expectations between young and old dogs. Taken together, these findings do not support the hypothesis that old dogs have more negative expectations than young dogs and the use of the cognitive bias test in older dogs requires further investigation.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.