Lifespan development of attentiveness in domestic dogs: drawing parallels with humans

Abstract

Attention is pivotal to consciousness, perception, cognition, and working memory in all mammals, and therefore changes in attention over the lifespan are likely to influence development and aging of all of these functions. Due to their evolutionary and developmental history, the dog is being recognized as an important species for modeling human healthspan, aging and associated diseases. In this study, we investigated the normal lifespan development of attentiveness of pet dogs in naturalistic situations, and compared the resulting cross-sectional developmental trajectories with data from previous studies in humans. We tested a sample of 145 Border collies (6 months to 14 years) with humans and objects or food as attention attractors, in order to assess their attentional capture, sustained and selective attention, and sensorimotor abilities. Our results reveal differences in task relevance in sustained attentional performance when watching a human or a moving object, which may be explained by life-long learning processes involving such stimuli. During task switching we found that dogs’ selective attention and sensorimotor abilities showed differences between age groups, with performance peaking at middle age. Dogs’ sensorimotor abilities showed a quadratic distribution with age and were correlated with selective attention performance. Our results support the hypothesis that the development and senescence of sensorimotor and attentional control may be fundamentally interrelated. Additionally, attentional capture, sustained attention, and sensorimotor control developmental trajectories paralleled those found in humans. Given that the development of attention is similar across humans and dogs, we propose that the same regulatory mechanisms are likely to be present in both species. Finally, this cross-sectional study provides the first description of age group changes in attention over the lifespan of pet dogs.

Aging and emotions: experience, regulation, and perception

“…For example, older adults are less accurate than younger adults in recognizing emotions from vocalizations, body movements, and dynamic or multimodal expressions [34, 35,36,37,38]. Consistent with past research, these effects appear to be stronger for negative expressions than positive expressions [39].…”

“…Indeed, the expressions posed by older targets appear to be equally difficult to recognize across age groups [44]. Instead, age differences are pronounced for expressions posed by younger targets [35]. Recent examinations of face gaze additionally suggest that direct-gazing faces negatively impact older adults’ emotion perception when faces are young [44], as is often the case in traditional emotion perception tasks.…”

The effect of age on visuo-spatial short-term memory in family dogs

“…The test could potentially be used in veterinary behaviour contexts to monitor cognitive changes in ageing dogs, utilizing a simple binary measure of success. (Halmágyi 2010;Lazarowski & Dorman 2015;Szabó et al 2016;Wallis et al 2014). For these reasons, the use of existing paradigms is limited to laboratory settings, and provides little benefit to the non-laboratory canine population.…”

“…Ageing in dogs is associated with the decline of several cognitive domains, such as learning, memory, visuospatial function, executive function, and attention (Folstein et al 1975;Head 2014;Landsberg et al 2012;Mongillo et al 2013;Svicero & Amorim 2017;Wallis et al 2014). The visuo-spatial memory domain is particularly interesting, because its decline precedes the onset of declines in other domains.…”

Age-Related Changes in Locomotor Performance Reveal a Similar Pattern forCaenorhabditis elegans,Mus domesticus,Canis familiaris,Equus caballus, andHomo sapiens

“…The shape of the patterns seems to match descriptions of other age-related locomotor performances in different species, such as flight performances in Drosophila (31), honeybees (32), and codling moths (33), maximal sprint speed in dogs and horses (34)(35)(36), physical activity in different rodents and monkeys (16,27,28), grip strength in mouse lemurs (15), hunting rates and success in wolves (37), swimming speed in zebrafish (38), and voluntary activity and electrotactic behavior in C. elegans (29,39). Likewise, other performance traits might follow a similar pattern, such as biting force in mouse lemur (40), cognitive performances in Rhesus monkey (41), attentiveness in domestic dogs (42), pharynx pumping rate in C. elegans (43), and perhaps even photosynthetic yield in cotton leaves (44).…”