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Canine Cognition

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Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior

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Dog behavior; Dog cognition; Dog intelligence

Definition

The study of the dog’s mind. The process by which dogs acquire, process, and store information and conceptual skills that inform behavior, including sensing, perceiving, learning, remembering, and reasoning.

Introduction

The species Canis lupus consists of two carnivores, wolves (Canis lupus), and a subspecies, dogs (Canis lupus familiaris). Mitochondrial DNA indicates that dogs and modern-day wolves began to diverge from a common ancestor around 100,00 years ago with true domestication beginning approximately 14,000 years ago (for a review see Galibert et al. 2011). However, it is important to highlight that the place(s) of the dog’s domestication event(s) and the process of how the domestication event(s) occurred remain unclear and contested.

Historically, dogs have been used as study subjects and model organisms in studies of psychological and biomedical research. Despite being the first domesticated animal, only...

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Correspondence to Sarah-Elizabeth Byosiere .

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Byosiere, SE., Prasad-Shreckengast, S. (2021). Canine Cognition. In: Vonk, J., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1700-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47829-6_1700-1

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