ArticleScientific reports2024
The odour of an unfamiliar stressed or relaxed person affects dogs' responses to a cognitive bias test.
Article in Scientific reports, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Stress in Free-Roaming and Shelter-Housed Dogs: A Review of Neurobiological, Physiological and Behavioral Mechanisms Relevant to Welfare Assessment.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Review
- Human-socialized dogs and wolves show similar behavioural reactions to human fear odour.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Dogs (Canis familiaris) distinguish conspecific emotional chemosignals.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Review
- The Role of Olfaction in Dogs: Evolution, Biology, and Human-Oriented Work.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2026Review
- Article
- Functional dyspepsia: from human to dog, a retrospective study of 29 cases illustrating a complex entity.BMC veterinary research · 2025Article
- The influence of regularly changing enrichment on the cognitive judgement bias of laboratory rats.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Dog owners' job stress crosses over to their pet dogs via work-related rumination.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- Not just avoidance: dogs show subtle individual differences in reacting to human fear chemosignals.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2025Article
- PTSD assistance dogs: concerns for animal well-being, rights, and justice.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Dogs can discriminate stressed from non-stressed human odour samples, but the effect on their cognition is unstudied. Using a cognitive bias task, we tested how human odours affect dogs' likelihood of approaching a food bowl placed at three ambiguous locations ("near-positive", "middle" and "near-negative") between trained "positive" (rewarded) and "negative" (unrewarded) locations. Using odour samples collected from three unfamiliar volunteers during stressful and relaxing activities, we tested eighteen dogs under three conditions: no odour, stress odour and relaxed odour, with the order of test odours counterbalanced across dogs. When exposed to stress odour during session three, dogs were significantly less likely to approach a bowl placed at one of the three ambiguous locations (near-negative) compared to no odour, indicating possible risk-reduction behaviours in response to the smell of human stress. Dogs' learning of trained positive and negative locations improved with repeated testing and was significant between sessions two and three only when exposed to stress odour during session three, suggesting odour influenced learning. This is the first study to show that without visual or auditory cues, olfactory cues of human stress may affect dogs' cognition and learning, which, if true, could have important consequences for dog welfare and working performance.
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