Meeting Abstract
Dogs were once written off as a highly artificial species with little to contribute to the scientific study of behavior, cognition, or evolution. However, across the last two decades there has been a resurgence of scientific interest in dogs, in fields ranging from cognitive science to genetics. I will present a series of studies probing diversity in cognitive processes in dogs, considering patterns of variation at both the breed and individual level. Using a combination of pedigree-based and molecular genetics approaches, we find that a large proportion of variance in diverse cognitive measures is attributable to genetic factors. I will present ongoing work aimed at identifying specific genetic variants associated with variance in these cognitive phenotypes and discuss the implications of this work for understanding the processes of cognitive evolution.
