So, if you're a dog lover like me, right now is, of course, a super exciting time

and that's because, not only have we just learned more in the last ten years than we

have in the previous 100, but there's such great opportunity for future discoveries.

And that's what this lecture is about is future discoveries and

I think what's going to be super important for that is Citizen Science.

So for this, any part of the book and

any part of Dognition is going to be relevant, but, of course, Dognition is

most relevant here because what we're going to be talking about is the impact of

Citizen Science on the future of discoveries about dog psychology.

And, of course, that's what Dognition is all about.

So what is Citizen Science?

Well, really it is anybody taking part and becoming a scientist.

I think that for a lot of people science is something done by other people.

But what Citizen Science is all about is you can do science.

There are lots of Citizen Science projects.

There are whole websites that have a collection of different Citizen Science

projects you can participate in.

Whether it is trying to understand how birds migrate to

where different trees are living.

And all of those types of ecological data help in understanding climate change and

all sorts of questions about how animals survive.

But when it comes to dogs, Dognition, is the only Citizen Science project.

But it really has the potential to become the largest dog dataset in history.

And that's because in most of the studies we've talked about

in the different lectures, there's a small sample of subjects.

Meaning a lot of the data, and

a lot of the results are reliable, they have been replicated, but

usually it's a small group of dogs, something between, 20, 30, 40 dogs.

But Dognition has the potential to have tens of thousands of dogs participate.

And, with that kind of power, we can answer questions together

that no one could have thought was possible answering before now.

And of course, there's tremendous power, potentially because if you look at

the population of dogs in different countries and

pet dogs especially, we're talking about tens of millions of dogs.

And since Dognition is on a website, anybody can become a Citizen Science and

participate in Dognition.

And not only will they learn about their own dog, but

of course we're all going to benefit as we make more discoveries about all dogs.

And the fun thing about Dognition is that we want all our

data to be publicly available.

So if you go to the Dognition website, there's a tab that says Explore the Data.

If you click on that, there will be a menu and

you can ask all sorts of questions already with the data.

So instead of guessing or having people disagree

about strong opinions, we can actually look at the data to answer some questions.

So if you're interested in how different breeds of dogs think.

If you're interested in how age may affect dog psychology,

all sorts of other questions you can ask.

You can actually even see chasers,

Dognition report on the explore the data tab.

And ask lots of questions.

And with that data, and

this is the type of data you'll see when you explore the data.

You can compare different groups of dogs to one another.

And what becomes a immediately apparent as we talked about when we talked about breed

differences is that breed isn't really communicating what you might think

it does.

Because if you look at the differences between here, sporting and herding dogs,

in empathy, communication, cunning, memory and reasoning, actually the two

groups of dogs aren't that different as represented by the dotted line for

the herding breeds, and the solid white for the sporting breeds.

They're not that different and that's because there's tremendous individual

variability within any group of dogs.

And breed is just not communicating what you might think it does,

especially about cognition.

Now if you use Dognition profiles, the story is completely different.

Dognition profiles really communicate about a dog's cognition in five

different types of intelligence that hopefully many of you have tried to

explore on your own dog.

And can tell us really what kind of dog is this if you know their Dognition profile.

Now, it doesn't mean that there are not any breed differences.

As we've talked about, we're discovering through Citizen Science

breed differences that you wouldn't have known about otherwise.

So, for instance, the idea that purebreds are better at using

human gestures while mixed breeds are better at using their memory or,

I shouldn't say better but they're more reliant on their memory.

I don't know that I would have predicted that

mixed breeds would be more reliant on their memory, but

that seems to be a very strong pattern in our Citizen Science data.

The other thing that is important to know,

is that we can look at the quality of the data.

Citizen Science, one of the worries is,

well I can't play these games with my dog the right way, or

you know I made mistakes, so lots of other people must make mistakes as well.

Well the neat thing is that we can compare the previously published

results to the current Citizen Science data.

And when we do that and that is represented on the left here,

where you have the Dognition data that we have been finding.

And then you compare that to previously published data from the Family Dog Project

that was published in peer reviewed scientific papers.

You can see the results look very similar when you look at arm pointing and

foot pointing.

So Citizen Scientists are finding a very similar

result as what has been found in conventional laboratory research.

And we're making discoveries that nobody has seen before.

Another example is looking at breed differences in empathy, but

breaking it down by the size of the dog.

I mean who would have thought that large dogs basically score as being more bonded

based on the eye contact and the yawning games through Dognition than smaller dogs.

So we're going to make all sorts of interesting discoveries together.

We can learn things about dogs that we couldn't learn about any other way.

So to summarize, Citizen Science is going to revolutionize how we study dogs.

Instead of a few scientists studying a few dogs we now have

thousands of Citizen Scientists studying thousands of dogs.

This has opened up a possibility to address questions that before we

really couldn't even approach scientifically.

And with the increase in power that Citizen Science provides us,

we can see patterns we couldn't see previously using conventional approaches.

So what that leads me to now is your dog.

And in the final lecture I want to talk to you about

how a Dognition profile might be interesting to you and your dog.

Citizen Science

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