Transposons in the Williams-Beuren Syndrome Critical Region are Associated with Social Behavior in Assistance Dogs

A strong signature of selection in the domestic dog genome is found in a five-megabase region of chromosome six in which four structural variants derived from transposons have previously been associated with human-oriented social behavior, such as attentional bias to social stimuli and social interest in strangers. To explore these genetic associations in more phenotypic detail-as well as their role in training success in a specialized assistance dog program-we genotyped 1001 assistance dogs from Canine Companions for Independence®, including both successful graduates and dogs released from the training program for behaviors incompatible with their working role. We collected phenotypes on each dog using puppy-raiser questionnaires, trainer questionnaires, and both cognitive and behavioral tests. Using Bayesian mixed models, we found strong associations (95% credibility intervals excluding zero) between genotypes and certain behavioral measures, including separation-related problems, aggression when challenged or corrected, and reactivity to other dogs. Furthermore, we found moderate differences in the genotypes of dogs who graduated versus those who did not; insertions in GTF2I showed the strongest association with training success (β = 0.23, CI95% = - 0.04, 0.49), translating to an odds-ratio of 1.25 for one insertion. Our results provide insight into the role of each of these four transposons in canine sociability and may inform breeding and training practices for working dog organizations. Furthermore, the observed importance of the gene GTF2I supports the emerging consensus that variation in GTF2I genotypes and expression have important consequences for social behavior broadly.

Response to Hansen Wheat et al.: Additional analysis further supports the early emergence of cooperative communication in dogs compared to wolves raised with more human exposure

Here, we address Hansen Wheat et al.'s commentary in this journal in response to Salomons et al. Current Biology, 31(14), 3137-3144.E11, (2021). We conduct additional analyses in response to Hansen Wheat et al.'s two main questions. First, we examine the claim that it was the move to a human home environment which enabled the dog puppies to outperform the wolf puppies in gesture comprehension tasks. We show that the youngest dog puppies who had not yet been individually placed in raisers' homes were still highly skilled, and outperformed similar-aged wolf puppies who had higher levels of human interaction. Second, we address the claim that willingness to approach a stranger can explain the difference between dog and wolf pups' ability to succeed in gesture comprehension tasks. We explain the various controls in the original study that render this explanation insufficient, and demonstrate via model comparison that the covariance of species and temperament also make this parsing impossible. Overall, our additional analyses and considerations support the domestication hypothesis as laid out by Salomons et al. Current Biology, 31(14), 3137-3144.E11, (2021).

Working Dog Training for the Twenty-First Century

Dogs are trained for a variety of working roles including assistance, protection, and detection work. Many canine working roles, in their modern iterations, were developed at the turn of the 20th century and training practices have since largely been passed down from trainer to trainer. In parallel, research in psychology has advanced our understanding of animal behavior, and specifically canine learning and cognition, over the last 20 years; however, this field has had little focus or practical impact on working dog training. The aims of this narrative review are to (1) orient the reader to key advances in animal behavior that we view as having important implications for working dog training, (2) highlight where such information is already implemented, and (3) indicate areas for future collaborative research bridging the gap between research and practice. Through a selective review of research on canine learning and behavior and training of working dogs, we hope to combine advances from scientists and practitioners to lead to better, more targeted, and functional research for working dogs.

Cooperative Communication with Humans Evolved to Emerge Early in Domestic Dogs

Although we know that dogs evolved from wolves, it remains unclear how domestication affected dog cognition. One hypothesis suggests dog domestication altered social maturation by a process of selecting for an attraction to humans.^1-3 Under this account, dogs became more flexible in using inherited skills to cooperatively communicate with a new social partner that was previously feared and expressed these unusual social skills early in development.^4-6 Here, we comparedog (n = 44) and wolf (n = 37) puppies, 5-18 weeks old, on a battery of temperament and cognition tasks. We find that dog puppies are more attracted to humans, read human gestures more skillfully, and make more eye contact with humans than wolf puppies. The two species are similarly attracted to familiar objects and perform similarly on non-social measures of memory and inhibitory control. These results are consistent with the idea that domestication enhanced the cooperative-communicative abilities of dogs as selection for attraction to humans altered social maturation.

Early-emerging and highly heritable sensitivity to human communication in dogs

Human cognition is believed to be unique in part because of early-emerging social skills for cooperative communication.¹ Comparative studies show that at 2.5 years old, children reason about the physical world similarly to other great apes, yet already possess cognitive skills for cooperative communication far exceeding those in our closest primate relatives.^2,3 A growing body of research indicates that domestic dogs exhibit functional similarities to human children in their sensitivity to cooperative-communicative acts. From early in development, dogs flexibly respond to diverse forms of cooperative gestures.^4,5 Like human children, dogs are sensitive to ostensive signals marking gestures as communicative, as well as contextual factors needed for inferences about these communicative acts.^6-8 However, key questions about potential biological bases for these abilities remain untested. To investigate their developmental and genetic origins, we tested 375 8-week-old dog puppies on a battery of social-cognitive measures. We hypothesized that if dogs' skills for cooperating with humans are biologically prepared, then they should emerge robustly in early development, not require extensive socialization or learning, and exhibit heritable variation. Puppies were highly skillful at using diverse human gestures, and we found no evidence that their performance required learning. Critically, over 40% of the variation in dogs' point-following abilities and attention to human faces was attributable to genetic factors. Our results suggest that these social skills in dogs emerge early in development and are under strong genetic control.

Enhancing the Selection and Performance of Working Dogs

Dogs perform a variety of integral roles in our society, engaging in work ranging from assistance (e.g., service dogs, guide dogs) and therapy to detection (e.g., search-and-rescue dogs, explosive detection dogs) and protection (e.g., military and law enforcement dogs). However, success in these roles, which requires dogs to meet challenging behavioral criteria and to undergo extensive training, is far from guaranteed. Therefore, enhancing the selection process is critical for the effectiveness and efficiency of working dog programs and has the potential to optimize how resources are invested in these programs, increase the number of available working dogs, and improve working dog welfare. In this paper, we review two main approaches for achieving this goal: (1) developing selection tests and criteria that can efficiently and effectively identify ideal candidates from the overall pool of candidate dogs, and (2) developing approaches to enhance performance, both at the individual and population level, via improvements in rearing, training, and breeding. We summarize key findings from the empirical literature regarding best practices for assessing, selecting, and improving working dogs, and conclude with future steps and recommendations for working dog organizations, breeders, trainers, and researchers.

Cognitive characteristics of 8- to 10-week-old assistance dog puppies

To characterize the early ontogeny of dog cognition, we tested 168 domestic dog, Canis familiaris, puppies (97 females, 71 males; mean age = 9.2 weeks) in a novel test battery based on previous tasks developed and employed with adolescent and adult dogs. Our sample consisted of Labrador retrievers, golden retrievers and Labrador × golden retriever crosses from 65 different litters at Canine Companions for Independence, an organization that breeds, trains and places assistance dogs for people with disabilities. Puppies participated in a 3-day cognitive battery that consisted of 14 tasks measuring different cognitive abilities and temperament traits such as executive function (e.g. inhibitory control, reversal learning, working memory), use of social cues, sensory discriminations and reactivity to and recovery from novel situations. At 8-10 weeks of age, and despite minimal experience with humans, puppies reliably used a variety of cooperative-communicative gestures from humans. Puppies accurately remembered the location of hidden food for delays of up to 20 s, and succeeded in a variety of visual, olfactory and auditory discrimination problems. They also showed some skill at executive function tasks requiring inhibitory control and reversal learning, although they scored lower on these tasks than is typical in adulthood. Taken together, our results confirm the early emergence of sensitivity to human communication in dogs and contextualize these skills within a broad array of other cognitive abilities measured at the same stage of ontogeny.

Predictive Models of Assistance Dog Training Outcomes Using the Canine Behavioral Assessment and Research Questionnaire and a Standardized Temperament Evaluation

Assistance dogs can greatly improve the lives of people with disabilities. However, a large proportion of dogs bred and trained for this purpose are deemed unable to successfully fulfill the behavioral demands of this role. Often, this determination is not finalized until weeks or even months into training, when the dog is close to 2 years old. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop objective selection protocols that can identify dogs most and least likely to succeed, from early in the training process. We assessed the predictive validity of two candidate measures employed by Canine Companions for Independence (CCI), a national assistance dog organization headquartered in Santa Rosa, CA. For more than a decade, CCI has collected data on their population using the Canine Behavioral Assessment and Research Questionnaire (C-BARQ) and a standardized temperament assessment known internally as the In-For-Training (IFT) test, which is conducted at the beginning of professional training. Data from both measures were divided into independent training and test datasets, with the training data used for variable selection and cross-validation. We developed three predictive models in which we predicted success or release from the training program using C-BARQ scores (N = 3,569), IFT scores (N = 5,967), and a combination of scores from both instruments (N = 2,990). All three final models performed significantly better than the null expectation when applied to the test data, with overall accuracies ranging from 64 to 68%. Model predictions were most accurate for dogs predicted to have the lowest probability of success (ranging from 85 to 92% accurate for dogs in the lowest 10% of predicted probabilities), and moderately accurate for identifying the dogs most likely to succeed (ranging from 62 to 72% for dogs in the top 10% of predicted probabilities). Combining C-BARQ and IFT predictors into a single model did not improve overall accuracy, although it did improve accuracy for dogs in the lowest 20% of predicted probabilities. Our results suggest that both types of assessments have the potential to be used as powerful screening tools, thereby allowing more efficient allocation of resources in assistance dog selection and training.

Characterizing Early Maternal Style in a Population of Guide Dogs

In both humans and non-humans, differences in maternal style during the first few weeks of life can be reliably characterized, and these differences affect offspring's temperament and cognition in later life. Drawing on the breeding population of dogs at The Seeing Eye, a guide dog school in Morristown, New Jersey, we conducted videotaped focal follows on 21 mothers and their litters (n = 138 puppies) over the first 3 weeks of the puppies' lives in an effort to characterize maternal style. We found that a mother's attitude and actions toward her offspring varied naturally between individuals, and that these variations could be summarized by a single principal component, which we described as Maternal behavior. This component was stable across weeks, associated with breed, litter size, and parity, but not redundant with these attributes. Furthermore, this component was significantly associated with an independent experimental measure of maternal behavior, and with maternal stress as measured by salivary cortisol. In summary, Maternal behavior captured a significant proportion of the variation in maternal style; was stable over time; and had both discriminant and predictive validity.

Increasing arousal enhances inhibitory control in calm but not excitable dogs

The emotional-reactivity hypothesis proposes that problem-solving abilities can be constrained by temperament, within and across species. One way to test this hypothesis is with the predictions of the Yerkes-Dodson law. The law posits that arousal level, a component of temperament, affects problem solving in an inverted U-shaped relationship: Optimal performance is reached at intermediate levels of arousal and impeded by high and low levels. Thus, a powerful test of the emotional-reactivity hypothesis is to compare cognitive performance in dog populations that have been bred and trained based in part on their arousal levels. We therefore compared a group of pet dogs to a group of assistance dogs bred and trained for low arousal (N = 106) on a task of inhibitory control involving a detour response. Consistent with the Yerkes-Dodson law, assistance dogs, which began the test with lower levels of baseline arousal, showed improvements when arousal was artificially increased. In contrast, pet dogs, which began the test with higher levels of baseline arousal, were negatively affected when their arousal was increased. Furthermore, the dogs' baseline levels of arousal, as measured in their rate of tail wagging, differed by population in the expected directions. Low-arousal assistance dogs showed the most inhibition in a detour task when humans eagerly encouraged them, while more highly aroused pet dogs performed worst on the same task with strong encouragement. Our findings support the hypothesis that selection on temperament can have important implications for cognitive performance.

The evolution of self-control

Cognition presents evolutionary research with one of its greatest challenges. Cognitive evolution has been explained at the proximate level by shifts in absolute and relative brain volume and at the ultimate level by differences in social and dietary complexity. However, no study has integrated the experimental and phylogenetic approach at the scale required to rigorously test these explanations. Instead, previous research has largely relied on various measures of brain size as proxies for cognitive abilities. We experimentally evaluated these major evolutionary explanations by quantitatively comparing the cognitive performance of 567 individuals representing 36 species on two problem-solving tasks measuring self-control. Phylogenetic analysis revealed that absolute brain volume best predicted performance across species and accounted for considerably more variance than brain volume controlling for body mass. This result corroborates recent advances in evolutionary neurobiology and illustrates the cognitive consequences of cortical reorganization through increases in brain volume. Within primates, dietary breadth but not social group size was a strong predictor of species differences in self-control. Our results implicate robust evolutionary relationships between dietary breadth, absolute brain volume, and self-control. These findings provide a significant first step toward quantifying the primate cognitive phenome and explaining the process of cognitive evolution.