Abstract
Across mammals, increased body size is positively associated with lifespan. However, within species, this relationship is inverted. This is well illustrated in dogs (Canis familiaris), where larger dogs exhibit accelerated life trajectories: growing faster and dying younger than smaller dogs. Similarly, some age-associated traits (e.g., growth rate and physiological pace of aging) exhibit accelerated trajectories in larger breeds. Yet, it is unknown whether cognitive performance also demonstrates an accelerated life course trajectory in larger dogs. Here, we measured cognitive development and aging in a cross-sectional study of over 4000 dogs from 66 breeds using nine memory and decision-making tasks performed by citizen scientists as part of the Dognition project. Specifically, we tested whether cognitive traits follow a compressed (accelerated) trajectory in larger dogs, or the same trajectory for all breeds, which would result in limited cognitive decline in larger breeds. We found that all breeds, regardless of size or lifespan, tended to follow the same quadratic trajectory of cognitive aging—with a period of cognitive development in early life and decline in later life. Taken together, our results suggest that cognitive performance follows similar age-related trajectories across dog breeds, despite remarkable variation in developmental rates and lifespan.
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Data accessibility
The dataset analyzed during the current study is not publicly available due to third party restrictions, but is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request and permission of Canines Inc. Supplementary Materials associated with this article are available online. Code used to complete the described analyses is available at https://github.com/mwatowich/Dog-cognition-across-aging.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Laurie Santos, Richard Wrangham, and all members of the Dognition team for helping create Dognition.com; the citizen scientists who contributed in collecting these data; Sarah Converse for helpful insight with statistical questions; Daniel Promislow for valuable feedback and sharing data vital to this project; Kenny Chiou, India Schneider-Crease, Corbin Johnson, Ian Dowsett, Sierra Sams, Lia Koklic, Grace DeCastro, and Matthew Harrington for their feedback on previous drafts.
Funding
This work was supported by the National Institute of Health Grants R00AG051764, U19AG057377, R01AG060931, R01HD097732. AM was supported by the National Brain Research Program (2017-1.2.1-NKP-2017-00002) and from the ELTE Institutional Excellence Program supported by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office (NKFIH-1157-8/2019-DT).
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MMW, ELM, BH, and NSM conceived of the project. MMW, ELM, and NSM analyzed the data. MMW, ELM, BH, JC, JK, ÁM, and NSM wrote the paper.
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BH is the founder of Dognition.com and is a member of the Dognition.com Scientific Advisory Board along with JC, JK, and ÁM.
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Watowich, M.M., MacLean, E.L., Hare, B. et al. Age influences domestic dog cognitive performance independent of average breed lifespan. Anim Cogn 23, 795–805 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-020-01385-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-020-01385-0