Characterizing Early Maternal Style in a Population of Guide Dogs

Bray, Emily E.; Sammel, Mary D.; Cheney, Dorothy L.; Serpell, James A.; Seyfarth, Robert M.

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00175

Cited by 25 publications

(57 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…From videotapes of mothers and puppies, we extracted seven variables of maternal behavior: time spent in a nursing box with puppies, contact, licking/grooming, lateral nursing (mother lying on side), vertical nursing (mother sitting/ standing), ventral nursing (mother lying on stomach), and orienting away from puppies. These behaviors all loaded onto one principal component (PC), Maternal behavior, that explained a significant portion of the variance (54%), remained stable over time, and was correlated with concurrent experimental and hormonal measures of maternal care (36). Mothers that scored high on this component were vigilant, often in proximity to their litter, and regularly interacted with their puppies (further details are provided in SI Materials and Methods).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, we analyzed which of the behaviors that loaded strongly onto Maternal behavior were associated with outcome (36). We standardized each variable and entered it singly as a predictor variable.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Complete methods used to study maternal style can be found in a study by Bray et al (36) (SI Materials and Methods).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Mothers and litters were videotaped (n = 328 min per litter on average) over the puppies' first 3 wk of life (36). Puppies were weaned at 5 wk and then sent at 7 wk to "puppy-raising" families who fostered, trained basic obedience, and exposed the puppies to a variety of experiences.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We began by observing mothers and their litters over the puppies' first 3 wk of life (36) (Table S1). We then tested the same individuals on 11 cognitive and temperament tasks as young adults, at 14-17 mo of age.…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

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Effects of maternal investment, temperament, and cognition on guide dog success

Bray

Sammel

Cheney

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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A continuing debate in studies of social development in both humans and other animals is the extent to which early life experiences affect adult behavior. Also unclear are the relative contributions of cognitive skills ("intelligence") and temperament for successful outcomes. Guide dogs are particularly suited to research on these questions. To succeed as a guide dog, individuals must accomplish complex navigation and decision making without succumbing to distractions and unforeseen obstacles. Faced with these rigorous demands, only ∼70% of dogs that enter training ultimately achieve success. What predicts success as a guide dog? To address these questions, we followed 98 puppies from birth to adulthood. We found that high levels of overall maternal behavior were linked with a higher likelihood of program failure. Furthermore, mothers whose nursing style required greater effort by puppies were more likely to produce successful offspring, whereas mothers whose nursing style required less effort were more likely to produce offspring that failed. In young adults, an inability to solve a multistep task quickly, compounded with high levels of perseveration during the task, was associated with failure. Young adults that were released from the program also appeared more anxious, as indicated by a short latency to vocalize when faced with a novel object task. Our results suggest that both maternal nursing behavior and individual traits of cognition and temperament are associated with guide dog success.guide dogs | nursing style | maternal style | temperament | cognition I t is often assumed that, in both human and nonhuman animals, variation in cognitive abilities contributes to variation in problemsolving skills. However, there remains little consensus about what attributes, exactly, comprise such abilities, because performance is affected not just by variation in general "intelligence" (1) or reasoning ability (e.g., refs. 2, 3) but also by variation in more affective attributes, such as impulse control, neophobia, motivation, and exploration (e.g., refs. 4-6).Similarly, the long-term effects of early life experiences remain poorly understood. There is now considerable evidence that early exposure to stress has lasting effects on physiology [e.g., humans (refs. 7-9), rodents (refs. 10, 11), rhesus macaques (ref.12 and reviewed in ref. 13)]. In rhesus macaques, mothering style is correlated with offspring cortisol and serotonin levels (14, 15), and in baboons, the male offspring of subordinate mothers exhibit higher glucocorticoid levels than the offspring of more dominant mothers (16). In rodents, experiences across the early weeks of life have lasting implications for later temperament measures, such as stress reactivity and fear (17, 18), and cognitive skills, such as spatial memory (19). Similar effects are observed in children, where negative life events in childhood are linked to later reductions in adolescent self-control (20).Guide dogs are particularly suited to research on the longterm effects of early experi...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Complete methods used to study maternal style can be found in a study by Bray et al (36) (SI Materials and Methods).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Effects of maternal investment, temperament, and cognition on guide dog success

Bray

Sammel

Cheney

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Temperament and problem solving in a population of adolescent guide dogs

et al. 2017

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It is often assumed that measures of temperament within individuals are more correlated to one another than to measures of problem solving. However, the exact relationship between temperament and problem-solving tasks remains unclear because large-scale studies have typically focused on each independently. To explore this relationship, we tested 119 prospective adolescent guide dogs on a battery of 11 temperament and problem-solving tasks. We then summarized the data using both confirmatory factor analysis and exploratory principal components analysis. Results of confirmatory analysis revealed that a priori separation of tests as measuring either temperament or problem solving led to weak results, poor model fit, some construct validity, and no predictive validity. In contrast, results of exploratory analysis were best summarized by principal components that mixed temperament and problem-solving traits. These components had both construct and predictive validity (i.e., association with success in the guide dog training program). We conclude that there is complex interplay between tasks of "temperament" and "problem solving" and that the study of both together will be more informative than approaches that consider either in isolation.

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