Dr. Lucia Lazarowski, chief behavioral scientist at Auburn University's Canine Performance Sciences Program, discusses her research on olfaction and behavior in detection dogs. Dr. Lazarewski shares insights on the best methods for training dogs to detect odors, the capacity of dogs to learn multiple odors, and the maintenance of odor memory and search training.
We also discuss the fascinating topic of inattentional blindness and how focus on one thing can prevent dogs from even noticing other stimuli - as well as the implications on training and the overall ability of the dog to cope with their environment. We discuss the use of early behavioral testing in working dogs and the reliability of temperament testing. We also touch on the factors associated with success in working dogs, such as confidence, stress resilience, cognitive flexibility, and impulse control. This is worth listening to even if you don't work with working dogs because much of this information likely applies to pet dogs as well!
Dr. Lazarowski emphasizes the need for further research on the behavior and performance of working dogs throughout their career and into old age. She also provides recommendations for improving the well-being of working dogs, including evidence-based training and providing a balance between work and downtime.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Dr. Lucia Lazarewski and her work with detection dogs
08:15 The Value and Training of Detection Dogs
24:41 The Importance of Maintenance Training for Detection Dogs
33:33 The Impact of Arousal on Performance
44:19 Cognitive Flexibility and Impulse Control
01:01:04 Unanswered Questions in Detection Dog Research
If you'd like to learn more or contact Dr. Spaulding, you can do so through our website www.sciencemattersllc.com.
Dr. Lucia Lazarowski, chief behavioral scientist at Auburn University's Canine Performance Sciences Program, discusses her research on olfaction and behavior in detection dogs. Dr. Lazarewski shares insights on the best methods for training dogs to detect odors, the capacity of dogs to learn multiple odors, and the maintenance of odor memory and search training.
We also discuss the fascinating topic of inattentional blindness and how focus on one thing can prevent dogs from even noticing other stimuli - as well as the implications on training and the overall ability of the dog to cope with their environment. We discuss the use of early behavioral testing in working dogs and the reliability of temperament testing. We also touch on the factors associated with success in working dogs, such as confidence, stress resilience, cognitive flexibility, and impulse control. This is worth listening to even if you don't work with working dogs because much of this information likely applies to pet dogs as well!
Dr. Lazarowski emphasizes the need for further research on the behavior and performance of working dogs throughout their career and into old age. She also provides recommendations for improving the well-being of working dogs, including evidence-based training and providing a balance between work and downtime.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Dr. Lucia Lazarewski and her work with detection dogs
08:15 The Value and Training of Detection Dogs
24:41 The Importance of Maintenance Training for Detection Dogs
33:33 The Impact of Arousal on Performance
44:19 Cognitive Flexibility and Impulse Control
01:01:04 Unanswered Questions in Detection Dog Research
If you'd like to learn more or contact Dr. Spaulding, you can do so through our website www.sciencemattersllc.com.
Kristina Spaulding (00:01.154)
Today on the podcast, we have Dr. Lucia Lazarewski. She is the chief behavioral scientist at Auburn University's Canine Performance Sciences Program and a research assistant professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine. She earned a bachelor's and master's degree in psychology from the University of North Carolina Wilmington studying olfactory learning in animals.
She then worked as a research specialist in North Carolina State University's College of Veterinary Medicine, researching olfaction, cognition, and behavior in dogs, and then went on to complete a PhD in cognitive and behavioral sciences from Auburn University, where she studied cognitive development in detection dogs. Following her PhD, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Auburn's canine performance.
Sciences Program studying olfactory memory and behavioral phenotyping of detection dogs. Her research revolves around all aspects of behavior in detection dogs, focusing on improving their selection, training, performance, and welfare. So welcome to the podcast, Lucia. I'm so happy to have you here to talk about olfaction. Sorry, I'm trying to...
Lucia Lazarowski (01:13.119)
Thank you for having me. Of course.
Kristina Spaulding (01:19.022)
close my email so that I didn't have notifications and it was making noises. Um, I'm going to do that again, cause I think we have that audio. Um, so welcome to the podcast, Lucia. I'm so glad to have you here. Yeah, this is great. I don't know a lot about olfaction. Uh, so I'm particularly interested in what you have to say today. And I like to start off with talking about what brought you to this subject and why you're interested in it.
Lucia Lazarowski (01:21.089)
Ha ha ha. Okay.
Lucia Lazarowski (01:30.295)
Thank you for having me.
Kristina Spaulding (01:47.318)
And what I noticed in your bio is that you've been interested in this for a long time. So what people may not realize is often when you, by the time you get to a PhD, you've had. Sometimes numerous twists and turns in terms of what your interest is, but it seems like this has been something that's been fairly consistent for you from the beginning.
Lucia Lazarowski (01:51.647)
Hehehe
Lucia Lazarowski (02:06.023)
Yeah, yeah, so I just always knew that I wanted to work with animals. I didn't really know what kind of path that would be. At the time there wasn't really a whole lot of, or I didn't really know about lots of different options, so I kind of thought I'd be a veterinarian. In college, quickly realized that I was not interested in medicine. I was more interested in behavior.
And I was also just taking psychology classes because I just enjoyed them and thought psychology was interesting and discovered a class on learning and behavior that had a rat lab that I thought was really cool. So I really enjoyed that class, learning how to design experiments, train the rats using skinner boxes. Just kind of a full circle moment because I currently teach that class now at Auburn. But so from there, I went on to do a master's in experimental psychology.
working with rats and using odors as the stimuli, because that's rats' primary sense that they use. And that's what kind of opened the door to then working with detection dogs, primarily odor learning and memory, and then expanding to kind of all aspects of behavior.
Kristina Spaulding (03:18.742)
Yeah, so that's great. And it's not, I mean, I don't know, is there a lot of research happening on all affection in rats? Is that an area of research that I'm just not aware of or is that more limited?
Lucia Lazarowski (03:27.651)
It's, yeah, so I mean, just the traditional animal laboratory, you know, rats and pigeons. And I think in more recent years, there's been a shift to using or trying to use stimuli that are more ecologically relevant for the species. So a lot of older research with rats was kind of looking like rats couldn't do certain tasks or their, you know, cognition was different compared
Kristina Spaulding (03:43.694)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Kristina Spaulding (03:50.9)
Mmm.
Lucia Lazarowski (03:57.567)
pictures to test rats, that's not really fair. And so if we use odor, that's more of a fair way to assess their cognition.
Kristina Spaulding (03:59.319)
Right.
Kristina Spaulding (04:05.106)
Yeah, and that's a really important point and something that comes up a lot, particularly in cognitive research, is this idea of ecologically relevant testing and making sure we are challenging animals with tasks that actually make sense for them, not because they're not necessarily smart enough, but it's just, is there any reason for them to be able to, you know, discriminate meaningfully between pictures? Not really.
Lucia Lazarowski (04:15.72)
Oh
Lucia Lazarowski (04:23.5)
rates.
Lucia Lazarowski (04:32.435)
Right?
Kristina Spaulding (04:34.722)
But for things like odors, that makes a lot more sense. And so we might then be missing certain capabilities that they have because we're just looking, we're asking the wrong questions, basically, or asking questions in the wrong way. So you mentioned that you do detection dog work. And for people who may not know a lot about detection dog work, can you give us a brief introduction to the subject and why we use dogs?
Lucia Lazarowski (04:44.127)
Mm-hmm.
Kristina Spaulding (05:04.182)
what is their advantage and if there are any limitations.
Lucia Lazarowski (05:07.783)
Yeah, so I mean, the main reason that we use dogs is simply that they can smell things that we can't. And so they're a very valuable asset in security, public safety, so screening for explosives or contraband in airports, eating and investigations, finding missing people or evidence, even in conservation efforts, dogs can find invasive or endangered species and help biologists. So
Main thing is just, you know, their superior sense of smell. But on top of that, they're also highly trainable. They're very cooperative. They like to work with humans. Most detection dogs work as a team with a handler. And so that trainability, that cooperation is really important. And it's just what they were bred to do. So they're just, they're very good at it. They enjoy it. Advantages would be that their nose is more sensitive than other technologies. So we do have
sensors you might have seen at airports that just aren't as sensitive or accurate as the dog's nose is. Dogs are more efficient so they're mobile, they're faster, they can cover a lot of space very quickly, so they could screen a whole crowd of people in a much faster amount of time than a sensor would have to go, you know, detecting every crevice and small area.
Dogs are really robust, they can work in different environments, different climates, different kinds of conditions that technologies and instruments would be more sensitive or vulnerable to. And then the flip side disadvantages being that dogs are living beings that have biological needs, they have to take breaks, their performance can fluctuate based on motivational factors, they can have a bad day.
I think more importantly, they are susceptible to human influence and human error. Our own biases and queuing or misinterpretation of the dog's behavior can kind of affect their performance.
Kristina Spaulding (07:16.094)
Yeah, that's really interesting. So I knew that, but I hadn't thought of it in terms of how it might apply to things like detection work. And so, so if I'm understanding you correctly, what you're saying is that maybe, you know, biases or responses from the human might cause the dog to be more likely or less likely to alert to something that may or may not be there.
Lucia Lazarowski (07:36.311)
Mm-hmm. Right.
Kristina Spaulding (07:40.726)
Yeah, and I think, what I think is really cool is that they're more accurate than technology, right? And we do all these amazing things with technology, and yet we still haven't been able to replicate the scale of dogs. And I wonder if maybe part of that is just because we don't have those senses, right? So how can we, it probably makes it much more difficult for us to design things that.
Lucia Lazarowski (07:49.227)
Mm-hmm.
Kristina Spaulding (08:08.17)
and replicate those senses, because we can't really imagine what that's like.
Lucia Lazarowski (08:11.727)
Yeah, and at the same time, it's possible that dog's noses are more sensitive than we currently know them to be just because the way that we're testing them, maybe we're not actually getting down into that threshold that dogs are able to detect just because we haven't found ways to test them at that level.
Kristina Spaulding (08:30.358)
Right, right. So kind of expanding on that, you do a lot of work on the nitty gritty details of odor detection. And like I said before, I'm really excited to talk about this. And not only for detection dogs, but also nose work has been very popular right now. And that obviously involves a lot of training for odor. And so let's start a little bit with
learning odor and I guess what I should do before I get into some of the more specific questions because again Maybe not everyone in our audience is familiar with this Can you just give a very brief overview of how you guys train a new odor for a detection dog?
Lucia Lazarowski (09:16.055)
Sure, and I'll start by saying that I'm not a trainer. I'm a researcher and I work with trainers. So I've learned a lot from them, but I'm speaking on behalf of what I know based on principles of animal learning and the different methods I see trainers use. But that said, different trainers have different methods. But essentially the first step, so a fur dog that has no background, no experience in detection, the first step when introducing a new odor is to
Kristina Spaulding (09:19.884)
Hehehehe
Kristina Spaulding (09:31.682)
Mm-hmm.
Lucia Lazarowski (09:44.767)
basically condition a response to that odor using classable conditioning. And so to teach the dog that odor predicts reward. And so just pairing odor with reward enough times until when the dog smells that odor, they're expecting they have a conditioned response, they're expecting a reward. And then from that, build a more of an operant response that is the dog's alert or indication to communicate clearly to the handler that they have
found something. And so for some dogs that's training them to sit when they detect an odor, sit and stare at the target. Some dogs might lay down or just stand and stare, some kind of behavior that's a defined response where the dog is showing the handler where the source of that odor is. And then you add in different odors, non-target distractor odors to make sure the dog can discriminate the target from other odors.
add the complexity of the task, whether it's finding the odor in different environments with different depth to the odor as far as where it's hidden and the barriers and just adding the complexity of that task.
Kristina Spaulding (10:58.686)
And is it primarily, do they primarily use toys as a reinforcer? Does that really depend on the dog?
Lucia Lazarowski (11:07.467)
Yes, it should depend on the dog. I would say that in the detection dog industry, toys are much more common. And a lot of that is because of the types of dogs that are used, that is their preferred reward. And so the dogs that are being selected and bred for these tasks have that really strong kind of play toy drive. But that's not to say that food can't be used if there's a dog that is motivated by food. And there are some groups that do use.
Kristina Spaulding (11:09.195)
Hehehe
Lucia Lazarowski (11:35.947)
food instead of toy. There's kind of pros and cons to both.
Kristina Spaulding (11:39.362)
Right, right, right. And so are most of these dogs being bred for detection work then? Or does that also vary?
Lucia Lazarowski (11:49.82)
So there's, I guess it depends on what kind of detection. So for explosive detection, a lot of the dogs actually come from overseas where there's a big history in Europe of breeding and producing these dogs for this purpose. In the U.S., there are a few breeding programs, not very many, but Auburn being one of them. So we do.
purpose breed dogs specifically for detection tasks. There are other groups. There are some conservation groups that they try to use shelter dogs. So they'll look through shelters to find dogs that might have the characteristics that they can then train for these tasks. And then there are in some disciplines like search and rescue and human remains being common ones where people actually train their own.
dog, their own pet dog, and then they volunteer to go out and help with different investigations.
Kristina Spaulding (12:50.638)
Okay, and how long does the training period, and I'm sure this depends too, but can you give us a sense of how long the training period generally lasts from when they start to when they're actually ready to start working in the field?
Lucia Lazarowski (13:03.571)
Yeah, so again, like you said, that depends a lot on the dog and kind of the goals of what that dog is going to be doing. So for our program, we do breed the dogs here. So really, you could say that their training starts the day that they're born, because we do start mostly with socialization and things of that nature. We're not actually introducing odors until later. But so really, from the time they're born until about a year old is the amount of time
we put into preparing the dogs. If you're talking about just how long it takes for the dog to learn an odor, dogs can learn an odor very quickly. An inexperienced dog, probably a couple of weeks to learn an odor, really be proficient at it, have a strong indication response. But then for dogs that are going to deploy and be operational, then there's a whole part where they are paired with a handler, and then it's several weeks of that team.
training together and certifying as a team that not only the dog can find and alert to the odors, but that the handler can work together with the dog and read the dog's behavior and that they together will be successful.
Kristina Spaulding (14:18.478)
Right, right, right. So it's very extensive training then on multiple levels. Okay. So now we can get into the nitty gritty details of learning odor. So one of the things that you have looked at is the impact of learning multiple odors on performance. And so when I saw the title of this paper, one of the papers, I thought, oh, we're talking about learning six or seven or eight odors, but you're actually talking about way more odors than that.
Lucia Lazarowski (14:20.375)
Mm-hmm.
Lucia Lazarowski (14:46.519)
Ha ha.
Kristina Spaulding (14:48.931)
Can you talk a little bit about what you studied and what you found in terms of the number of voters learned?
Lucia Lazarowski (14:55.223)
Sure, so yeah, kind of the goal of that study was to determine if there's a limit on how many odors a dog can learn. Because detection dogs, especially explosives, for example, the number of odors that they're required to know is continuing to increase as new threats emerge, different variations of explosives. And so they're required to learn a pretty long list of odors, and we don't really know if there is.
a maximum capacity where memory is full and they can't learn any more odors, can't fit anything else in, sort of a proactive interference. And so we trained dogs on a long list of odors over the course of several months, basically every couple of months. New odors were trained at the same time we were testing dogs for their recall of odors that they had learned several months back earlier in the list. So we're looking both at.
the ease in which dogs could learn additional odors as their list got longer and longer, and whether that new learning interfered with memory for the previously learned odors. And what we found was that dogs could easily learn up to 40 odors, and that was just the maximum that we tested in the study, there's probably way more that they could have learned, and we just didn't, we didn't go that far.
But so up to 40 odors without any difficulty learning, they actually got better and faster at learning as more odors were introduced and no impact of their recall in those previously learned odors. And so once we got to the 40th odor test, the last one that we had tested or trained, we tested for a memory of those first odors trained several months earlier.
that they hadn't seen in several months, and they were just as good at detecting those odors as the ones that they had just learned.
Kristina Spaulding (16:53.118)
Yeah, I mean, I have this feeling a lot, I think, when I'm learning new things about dog behaviors. On the one hand, I'm very surprised, and then I immediately think, well, why am I surprised? I shouldn't be surprised by this. But really, really cool that they can learn that many odors, and it makes me think a lot about, or pet dogs, enrichment, and how very important it probably is.
for them to have access to opportunities for sniffing and smelling because their capacity for that is just so vast. And because it's such important part of how they experience the world. And luckily there are odors, you know, there are lots of odors in most environments, I would think. But even things, and of course, lots of people talk about this now in the...
pet dog training world, but just the importance of allowing dogs to smell on walks, which so many people don't do, and how much that's probably potentially having a negative impact on their welfare.
Lucia Lazarowski (17:57.375)
Mm-hmm.
Lucia Lazarowski (18:08.307)
Yeah, I mean, that's their world. They see the world with their noses. And like I said earlier, they're selling things that we don't see. And so we may be depriving them of, you know, they want to sniff something that's very interesting and informative, and we're not allowing them to because we don't realize it's there. And so, yeah, it's very enriching to let them do these things that is just their natural way of exploring the world.
Kristina Spaulding (18:32.51)
Right. So you said that they were able to maintain their original odors for many months, even while new odors are being introduced. So in general, what does their ability to maintain memory for odors look like, and how much, if any, maintenance training do they need?
Lucia Lazarowski (18:59.851)
So we looked at that specifically in a separate study. So in the study that I just mentioned, we were testing memory in a sense that when we were testing for these older odors, obviously it had been a while since they saw them. So there was a memory component, but in a different study, we looked at how long dogs can remember odors when they haven't seen any odors in several months. And so we're looking sort of at long-term memory for odors, how long can they remember an odor once it's trained, and...
Part of the study was also looking at how frequently dogs needed maintenance training on odors because detection dogs, especially explosives, for example, they don't encounter their target odors very often when they're working, which is a good thing for us. But so, and we know from other studies that repeatedly searching the same area and not finding anything, their detection will start to decline because they've just learned to not.
Kristina Spaulding (19:44.122)
Yeah.
Lucia Lazarowski (19:56.747)
expect anything there, they just are out of practice in finding those odors in those environments. And so we're looking at, first of all, how long can they go without needing any exposure to their odors and how much maintenance training is needed to maintain operational performance. And so we had a group of dogs trained on a set of 10 odors and then split them into two groups where over the course of a year, one group had
monthly maintenance training and the other group had no odor training and then we retested both groups on those 10 odors at the end of that year. The catch here was that for the maintenance training group, they only ever saw one of their odors in that maintenance training. And so the question here was, do they need to see all of their odors to maintain performance on them? Or can you just use one, a sort of a surrogate odor to maintain all of their other odors? Which would be
very efficient for trainers to be able to do, especially when talking about explosives that are hazardous or you have limitations on how frequently, access to them and how frequently you can train with them or different locations you can put them in. If we can maintain performance with just one odor that's easier to use and access, then that'd be really helpful. And so what we found was that, first of all, for the dogs that had no odor training in the whole year, they were still about 75%
accurate in detecting all 10 odors that they hadn't seen in 12 months, which is really not that bad. So that in itself was interesting that, you know, odor memory in dogs tends to be pretty robust over time, not having experienced any odor training at all in a year. The dogs that had the maintenance training, and again, this was just once a month with just one of their odors.
they were nearly perfect in detecting all of their odors at the end of the year, even the ones they hadn't seen in 12 months. And so that does suggest that you can use sort of this surrogate odor concept to effectively maintain detection of other targets without having to use all of those targets, which is again important for when you have limited access to different odors. You can use one, you can even use an odor that's not really a target odor, that's just something that you use for maintenance training.
Lucia Lazarowski (22:17.803)
but detection of the other targets will be maintained.
Kristina Spaulding (22:22.542)
So I find this really fascinating. And this is, if I'm understanding correctly, this is consistent with what you found in the other study too, where you were teaching multiple odors. Because in that case, you also tested them on some original odors that they hadn't learned for a while. And they maintained, if I remember correctly, it was like 99% accuracy or something.
Lucia Lazarowski (22:31.638)
Mm-hmm.
Lucia Lazarowski (22:42.599)
Yeah, so in that study, they also were very accurate in recalling odors they hadn't seen in a year, but they had been engaged in frequent training with all these other odors in the meantime. And so it was possible that just doing that just helped their memory of all their odors. So now in this study, we're showing that even in the absence of any training or even training with just one odor, their memory is still maintained pretty well.
Kristina Spaulding (23:09.27)
Do you have, like that is not what I would have predicted. So do you have thoughts on why it works like that? Like obviously if you're training monthly on one odor, I would expect that odor's, you know, detection ability to remain higher. But I am surprised that it applies to all odors, even odors they haven't been exposed to for 12 months. So do you have thoughts on why that it works like that?
Lucia Lazarowski (23:12.095)
I'm gonna go.
Lucia Lazarowski (23:38.075)
It seems to just be some kind of association that one odor is linked to the other odors that it was trained together with, even though they were not similar odors. So it's not that the maintenance odor was, in the same class of odors and they were similar, they were very different odors, but somehow they were all trained together and then just maintenance training with this one, like sort of just linked to the memory.
Kristina Spaulding (23:47.714)
Mm.
Lucia Lazarowski (24:04.627)
to the other odors. But yeah, I mean, that's a great question that we didn't directly answer, but that seems to be possibly what was going on.
Kristina Spaulding (24:12.974)
Okay, so that makes me wonder if, and I'm thinking of this in terms of like nose work training, but I imagine it's pretty similar to detection dog training. Do you think it's better than to train multiple new odors at once, as opposed to training one odor until that's really solid and then a second odor and then a third?
and so on.
Lucia Lazarowski (24:43.908)
So there is some published research on that in rats and we are actually currently looking at that in dogs. And there's this concept of intermixed training that seems to be more effective than sequential, which would be what you were referring to where traditionally you train one odor to proficiency, then the next odor, and that's how we did it in these studies. But from...
From the research, it seems that intermix training where you get a few trials with one odor, a few with a different one, and you're kind of seeing them all in the same session, it seems that is a more efficient way of training.
Kristina Spaulding (25:27.286)
That's interesting, because I would have, prior to having this conversation, I would have predicted that, like I would never have suggested that someone train it that way. But I guess in a way, maybe what's happening there is that the dogs are immediately getting practice with discrimination and being able to distinguish between the different odors. And so I could see how that might work better than training them sequentially. So that's really interesting.
Lucia Lazarowski (25:34.853)
Hehehehehe
Lucia Lazarowski (25:44.927)
rates.
Lucia Lazarowski (25:56.425)
Mm-hmm.
Kristina Spaulding (25:59.09)
Another thing that you guys found in this study was that the there was there was a difference between the dog's ability to discriminate between odors and their search performance, correct?
Lucia Lazarowski (26:15.279)
Yes, so we actually looked at sort of two different aspects of the dog's performance. One being sort of a more basic discrimination training in like a lineup of boxes, kind of static search scenario, just a basic discrimination task. And that was really a test for the basic memory recall of the odor. So there's an odor out there, there's distractors out there, do they respond to the target or not?
Lucia Lazarowski (26:45.423)
searching ability in an operational environment. So where the odor is hidden somewhere and the dog has to search a wide area, investigate different areas, detect the odor that's not as easily accessible. It might be in a drawer or has some layers to it. And then not only detect the odor, but also perform their indication response, which they also did in the discrimination task, but more of a chain of the searching, locating, identifying, responding.
And what we found is that the recall for the odors, as tested in the discrimination task, that's where dogs showed very high memory, very high recall. In the search task, that's where performance did seem to decline substantially, even with the maintenance training. And so what that's kind of telling us is that it's not the memory for the odor that declined because they still were able to...
pick out the odor in the lineup at a very high accuracy, both for the dogs that had maintenance training and dogs without, but in the search task, they were not responding to the odor at very high rates. And what we were seeing was that they did seem to recognize the odor and acknowledge it, but then they would leave it. So it's like that sequence, that chain of the searching and the finding and then alerting.
that's what kind of decayed over time as opposed to the actual memory. And so that kind of tells us that to prioritize maintenance training, you don't need to really drill on the identifying the odor and the odor memory part, because that part of it seems to be very robust. It's the actual practice of this actual search behavior and finding the odors in these complex environments that might need more maintenance training.
Kristina Spaulding (28:37.166)
That's interesting. So are you saying that they appear, it appears that they were detecting the odors but they weren't indicating on them? Is that what you said?
Lucia Lazarowski (28:48.183)
To an extent, yeah, so we typically measure response, a correct response being the dog actually performed its indication. The blind handler calls the response because their dog performed their trained response. But we also look at what in the industry a lot of times is called a change of behavior, basically the conditioned response. So it's that initial kind of head snap, the dog recognized an odor, showed some interest.
Kristina Spaulding (28:49.856)
Okay.
Kristina Spaulding (28:58.85)
Mm-hmm.
Kristina Spaulding (29:10.542)
Mm-hmm.
Lucia Lazarowski (29:16.075)
but didn't perform its full indication. And we did see that in that search scenario, the dogs, I mean, as a whole, their performance dropped. They weren't, you know, they were missing their targets. They weren't performing as well, but we did still see some of that recognition of the odor, just not the full response behavior.
Kristina Spaulding (29:37.794)
So does that suggest that maybe for people who are training, doing odor work, that once the dog has learned an odor that future training should possibly focus more on the search and specifically the indication?
Lucia Lazarowski (29:54.899)
Exactly.
Kristina Spaulding (29:56.982)
really interesting. And so the other thought that I have is, and this is my like my undergraduate degree is in wildlife ecology. So this is my ecology training kicking in and some of the you know, the psychology research work but
So I'm gonna ask two questions back to back. So the first question is, where are they being tested? Are they being tested in indoor scenarios? And do you think that you might see a difference in behavior if they were in a more natural, like ecologically relevant setting?
Lucia Lazarowski (30:31.883)
So in this study, they were tested indoors. So it was a building with lots of different offices and rooms and lots of junk, which is good for these kinds of tasks because the dogs have to search through different things and you can hide targets. And I think that there's probably both sides to that. So typically when we do these studies, we do the searches indoors because you can control for, there's lots of factors when you,
Kristina Spaulding (30:41.934)
Mm-hmm, right.
Lucia Lazarowski (31:00.863)
have a dog searching outside the humidity, the temperature, the wind direction that can have a huge impact on their performance. And so we tend to do those things inside to just control for those things. But yeah, that's really interesting question just regarding the more naturalistic environment. And these dogs had lots of training to search in these kinds of building type areas. So they were used to that.
Kristina Spaulding (31:06.315)
Yeah.
Kristina Spaulding (31:10.595)
Uh...
Right.
Kristina Spaulding (31:23.96)
Right.
Kristina Spaulding (31:28.458)
Yeah, and that's the environment that they would typically be searching in, right? I mean, not all detection dogs, but the explosive dogs are typically going to be indoors, I would think, usually. Um, okay. So I am asking too many questions because I'm like looking at the time, like, Oh, we're already more than halfway through. Although we can go over if you have the time to stay a little bit longer, but. Um, so I did not write down a specific, Oh, I did write down a specific question for this.
Lucia Lazarowski (31:31.181)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Lucia Lazarowski (31:45.579)
Yeah.
Lucia Lazarowski (31:49.685)
Sure.
Kristina Spaulding (31:57.922)
So, inattentional blindness. You published a paper recently on inattentional blindness that I thought was really cool. And can you tell us what inattentional blindness is and what you learned about it in this paper?
Lucia Lazarowski (32:14.751)
Sure, so it's basically a phenomenon that occurs when you fail to notice something unexpected that's in plain view simply because of a lack of attention, really because your attention is focused on something else. So it's not that you fail to see it because of a perceptual visual issue, it's really an attentional thing. Your attention is diverted to something else and you fail to notice something very obvious in plain view.
Most of this work was done in humans. There's a lot of those hidden camera shows where someone is talking to someone on the street and then something, a diversion happens and then the person that was talking to them changes and now it's a completely different person and they don't realize that person switched. So it's kind of this like change blindness. There's the classic gorilla basketball video that's shown in a lot of like Psych 101 classes where
You're asked to count the number of basketball passes and you're so focused on that people don't notice a person in a gorilla suit walks by in the background. So that's kind of the idea here. And what we did, and we based this off of a study that was done in horses, which to my knowledge was the first study looking at this in animals, where the dogs were trained to run down a hallway where one group ran down the hallway and nothing happened and they just got brought back and they just did that over and over again.
The other group, when they got to the end, they received a reward for these dogs that was a toy. And after doing that several times, then a novel object, in this case an inflatable dragon, big inflatable dragon, was put to the side of the area that they were running past, in plain view, just kind of slightly off to the side. And what we found was that the dogs that were in the group that got the reward at the end, not a single dog in that group, noticed.
the dragon, whereas the dogs in the other group were more likely to notice it. And so that idea there is that we sort of created this expectation of reward and focus their attention so much on that, that they just completely failed to notice something very obvious in the environment.
Kristina Spaulding (34:27.03)
Yeah, I love this because it's like an inflatable dragon is something that most dogs would immediately notice and pay a lot of attention to. So I love that you chose that and not something kind of less salient because I think it makes the results that much stronger. And I love this for pet dogs. I mean, it applies to all kinds of other populations, too, but.
Lucia Lazarowski (34:38.851)
Hehehehe
Kristina Spaulding (34:54.946)
So the two things that occurred to me is I wonder if there's a relationship between creating opportunities for reward in an environment and expectations for reward and fear responses to novel stimuli. I mean, it suggests that potentially there could be something going on there. And for the listeners, I think we have to be really careful because that's kind of a leap.
So we would need more research on that, but that's where my mind goes is wondering. And I wonder, and I don't know that your study, I'm curious to see what your thoughts are on this, because I don't know that your study really gets at this.
I wonder if that has anything to do with like an optimistic pessimistic bias where. When an animal's feeling more pessimistic, they're more inclined to kind of notice or interpret, um, ambiguous stimuli as being threatening, potentially threatening. But in this case, you kind of created a situation where the rewarded group of dogs was anticipating reinforcement. And I wonder if that had something to do with it. I didn't prepare you for any of these questions, but.
Lucia Lazarowski (35:54.113)
Mm-hmm.
Lucia Lazarowski (36:06.287)
No, yeah, that's a great question. And I definitely think that could be the case in this study. So we did actually like code the dog's responses. We were originally planning on scoring the response from like no fear to fear kind of on a gradient, but the dogs just either didn't notice it at all or they just kind of looked at it and kept going. So it actually didn't seem to be a fear response, which is what we were expecting. It was just, they were so focused on something else, they just didn't even see it.
Kristina Spaulding (36:21.166)
Mm-hmm.
Kristina Spaulding (36:32.59)
Right.
Yeah, yeah. So that's super interesting. And then of course, the other way it comes in with pet dogs, right, is when you have the client is working with the dog and the dog is not listening. And a lot of trainers will comment that they don't even hear you because they're so focused on that smell or whatever it is. And we've been saying this for a very long time but now we actually have some research data to back it up.
very well could be that they aren't registering what the person is saying. I always joke with my family that it's like, if you try and talk to me when I am reading a book and I do not stop what I'm doing and look up at you and respond, that it's not my fault if I don't remember that conversation. And so that's the same kind of thing. It's like, I might actually be responding. Like you said, some of them looked at.
Lucia Lazarowski (37:16.832)
Hehehehe
Lucia Lazarowski (37:21.441)
Yeah.
Kristina Spaulding (37:28.778)
dragons, but then they just continued on and so they're not necessarily processing that then.
Lucia Lazarowski (37:29.332)
Mm-hmm.
Lucia Lazarowski (37:35.951)
Yeah, and that's what actually inspired this study that we don't talk about too much in the paper, but kind of the idea from this study came from our work and our trainers observations with socializing our puppies where there was a strong emphasis on the, on sort of conditioning the dogs to always be in this work mode, always be in this search mode so that they never miss a target because that's very important. But it seemed like that was sort of creating this blinder effect where
when they were being taken to different environments to work on socialization, but they were also being worked. They were hunting for their toys. Seemed like they just weren't noticing things. And so then later, those blinders eventually come off and they're suddenly seeing the world for the first time. And we're now seeing reactions that we didn't see before because they were sort of in that mode that they just weren't seeing things. And so that sort of shifted how we develop the puppies now is to make sure that there's a...
Kristina Spaulding (38:12.192)
Mmm.
Lucia Lazarowski (38:34.315)
balance because you do want them to, you know, you do want to obviously work on searching and emphasize that, but it does need to be a balance where they're not always in that work mode and they do have opportunities to just go for a walk around a busy environment and they're seeing things and they're noticing things and learning to work through those things and not have this kind of crutch or blinder effect.
Kristina Spaulding (38:58.386)
Yes, I could spend a lot of time talking about this. So this is a really important point, I think. And so I'm just gonna repeat it, is what you're saying is that if too much time is spent in that sort of training mode and getting the dogs to focus and work, then what's happening is they're not.
Lucia Lazarowski (38:59.531)
Hehehe
Kristina Spaulding (39:21.31)
noticing and interacting with the environment enough, and that may actually be leading to problems down the road in terms of their reactivity to stimuli in the environment.
Lucia Lazarowski (39:32.347)
Yeah, that's at least what we think could be happening. And I mean, you could also, on the flip side, you could use that to your advantage, kind of like what you were saying, if you do have a dog that has an issue, you could use this to work through that, but it seems like it could also be creating issues if it's too much of one or the other.
Kristina Spaulding (39:51.178)
Right, so what I would say from my perspective, not working with working dogs and working with pet dogs is that, like, yes, I agree with both of those things, right? So if we spend too much time focusing on responses to external cues, then what I feel like, and I don't have a lot of data to back this up, although I think what you're talking about backs it up, which is not enough all on its own, but, is that
The dogs aren't, they're learning to become very good at responding to external cues, which is great, but they're not necessarily learning a lot of sort of internal regulation skills, which are also important. So they're not, if we focus too much on that one thing, on that responding to cues, they're not also developing their own set of skills for responding to the environment. That's been my observation with working with.
pet dogs. And so that seems very consistent with what you're talking about. And I agree, I think it's important to have some of both. I mean, sometimes you want them to ignore those external stimuli, and they're not going to be working all the time.
Lucia Lazarowski (40:50.364)
Mm-hmm.
Lucia Lazarowski (41:05.929)
Right.
Kristina Spaulding (41:06.93)
So that is really, really interesting. Okay, so that I think actually kind of opens the door a little bit to our next topic, which is the selection of working dogs and doing early behavioral tests and things like that. And so obviously working dog selection is a huge topic and it's gonna include a lot of different factors. But...
There's, I think it's definitely worth talking about some of the things that you mentioned come up the most. And this is something that I think that also applies. So obviously this is gonna apply to working dog trainers, but I think it also applies really to anyone or would be of interest to anyone who's trying to make predictions about a dog's future behavior. And so in working dogs, you guys do a lot of early behavioral testing.
And there's a perception among many dog professionals that temperament testing doesn't work. And this is primarily coming out of temperament testing that's been found to be unreliable in shelter dog environments. But some of it is also from puppy testing. And I think there's a lot of nuance to this topic. So can you start by talking and...
Lucia Lazarowski (42:30.172)
Mm-hmm.
Kristina Spaulding (42:33.83)
general terms about what kind of testing you guys do and why and how reliable it is.
Lucia Lazarowski (42:40.807)
Sure. So this is basically behavioral tests to assess characteristics believed to be important for a detection dog career. And we test puppies across different stages of development and training, really for a number of reasons. One is to assess their performance and identify strengths and weaknesses to then be able to tailor their training or make decisions about
the trajectory of their career based on its potential. Lots of time and money and resources go into their training and development. So the earlier that we can make decisions about dogs that maybe don't have great chances and maybe need a career change or to be adopted, that obviously will save a lot. We also hope to be able to use this phenotypic data to combine with genetic data to identify the heritability of certain traits or...
identify certain important genes that can then improve breeding and selection. And so we really, we do it to get data, but also to be able to assess the dog's performance and their progression over time and sort of use it for lots of different reasons and what we have found recently. So we've had a version of our assessment that's kind of gone through several iterations.
kind of tweak things and change things to try and standardize it and make it more reliable and have done a couple of validation efforts where we have found that, yes, it does appear to be reliable over time and contexts and different individuals that are scoring the test where it seems that certain tests performed at early ages can predict the dog's outcome at the end of training. So around a year old, if the dog was selected.
or rejected. And then we've also done some follow-up work to look at longer term success in those, do those early tests predict the dog's ability or if the dog is still working two, three years later. So not just selection, but also they're kind of the longevity of their, of their working career.
Kristina Spaulding (44:54.43)
Yeah, and so they're not, so temperament testing can be informative and it's also gonna depend a lot on the population, right? So you guys are working with purpose-bred dogs that have very similar environments and very similar training experiences. And so it would make sense that you guys are gonna have higher accuracy in your behavioral testing.
than people who are testing puppies that are going to pet homes, or especially shelter dogs, right? Who are, they're being tested in an environment that's very dramatically different from the environment that they're being placed in. But.
Lucia Lazarowski (45:35.391)
Yeah, and I think a lot, so like you said, a lot of the research has shown that these puppy tests tend to really not be predictive. And I think that, like what you're saying, the reason that we are finding this higher reliability is we have more control over sort of the genetics and the environment, because essentially, when a puppy tests...
is not predictive, that's suggesting that there's a lot of environmental influence. Obviously, there's lots of developmental changes over time. We know the environment interacts with genetics, lots of changes occur. But when we're finding that tests early on are predictive, that is suggesting a stronger genetic basis that's less susceptible to environmental influence. And so again, when we have this very highly controlled...
closely related population that's raised in the same environment. I think that's where we're able to kind of tease some of that apart.
Kristina Spaulding (46:32.119)
And so what are some of the specific factors that you have found that are associated with success and how stable do they appear to be across development?
Lucia Lazarowski (46:41.771)
So what seems to be the number one factor, not just for detection dogs, but really all working dogs is this kind of general confidence or lack of fearfulness, sort of a stress resilience, because working dogs have to work in all kinds of unpredictable environments, and they have to be able to perform their job despite crowds of people, loud noises, traffic, weird objects, and that seems to consistently be reported as
the reason that dogs do fail from training or have to retire early because they have some, you know, fear or issues with things related to that. And that is what we found as well is that our tests that are measuring the dog's reactions to novel objects or just kind of assessing their boldness versus their fearfulness, those tend to be very predictive and stable across development.
suggesting that is kind of a pretty strongly genetically based trait and we know that is one of the kind of make-or-break factors in their ability to be successfully deployed.
Kristina Spaulding (47:56.266)
And are you seeing stress resilience and emotional reactivity as being kind of two ends of the same spectrum? Is that how you view that?
Lucia Lazarowski (48:06.331)
So we, I think a lot of these terms kind of get used interchangeably, but kind of all revolve around the same sort of concept that so when we are our test we call an emotional reactivity test because we are basically presenting the dog with something surprising or startling or Scary and we're seeing how they react and how they recovered from that And that scene that reaction in that test and a lot of times people
Kristina Spaulding (48:09.567)
Yeah.
Lucia Lazarowski (48:34.835)
see these tests and it does seem like a very artificial test. It's very far removed from what the dogs would actually be encountering. So if you see our tests, like, of course the dog would react. We're having them, you know, we're presenting them with a, literally a taxidermy grizzly bear or, um, those inflatable flailing men that, you know, of course, dogs are going to react, but we do see a lot of variability in how, you know, some dogs have no issue with it. And those are the dogs that seem to be.
Kristina Spaulding (48:54.091)
Yeah.
Lucia Lazarowski (49:01.331)
successful and so that does seem to be related to their general stress resilience outside of that specific test context in terms of how they Deal with the stress of being in a kennel or riding on vehicles or working out in novel environments
Kristina Spaulding (49:20.51)
Yeah, and can you give an example of how a dog that sort of scores high on emotional reactivity might respond versus one that scores low in terms of what their actual behavior looks like in that test?
Lucia Lazarowski (49:31.735)
Sure, yeah, so, and it gets kind of confusing with the high versus low because we, the way we score it, a high score actually means a lack of a response. A really high reactivity would be a lower score, but regardless of that, basically the dogs that are showing strong emotional reactivity, those would be the dogs that they, as soon as they see the object, they are just gonna balk and refuse to go up to it, refuse to explore it.
Kristina Spaulding (49:36.549)
Hehe.
Kristina Spaulding (49:42.101)
Okay.
Lucia Lazarowski (50:01.935)
need excessive encouragement from the handler, just really showing lots of signs of fear and stress. We usually stop the test at that point. We don't force them to do anything further. And then the mid-range, you as mother's dogs do hesitate. At first they go, okay, what is that? They may show some hesitation. The handler is able to encourage them to approach it and explore, and then they're okay with it. And then kind of the high end of that would be the dogs that just...
Kristina Spaulding (50:10.666)
Right.
Lucia Lazarowski (50:30.891)
don't even really flinch, they notice it, they keep working, they're not really affected or concerned about it at all.
Kristina Spaulding (50:38.23)
Okay. And what about dogs that, I mean, I don't know if you see this, I certainly feel like I see this in the dogs I work with, that show a strong emotional response, but they're approaching it rather than avoiding it. So like rushing at it and barking. How does that predict success? Or do you know?
Lucia Lazarowski (50:56.395)
So we do, so that's a great question that we have, we have attempted to tease apart. And we try and look at global behavior as a whole because a dog could approach it because it's interested and confident and excited about it, or a dog could approach it as a sort of a defensive, more aggressive reaction. And so just the approach on its own, we don't take that in isolation. We look at, did the dog approach it, but it had a relaxed.
friendly tail wagging posture or was it barking hackles up and it was more of like an aggressive offensive response.
Kristina Spaulding (51:35.682)
So the ones that have that more barking hackles up aggressive defensive response. Does that is that associated with less likelihood of success later on? Okay.
Lucia Lazarowski (51:46.579)
Yeah, right. Yes. Yeah. So we, so both, um, kind of the fight in the flight side of that are both considered that they're probably both stemming from the same kind of fear. It's just how the dog is dealing with that. And you would, you would not want a dog in the real world that responds in that way. That could be, you know, liability. They could hurt somebody. That could be a problem.
Kristina Spaulding (51:54.751)
Right.
Kristina Spaulding (52:12.022)
Right, right, right.
Lucia Lazarowski (52:12.563)
just the same as you wouldn't want a dog that's gonna be so scared that it can't do its job because it won't go into a room or what have you. So to both of those we would consider undesirable.
Kristina Spaulding (52:23.262)
And do you think that those two different responses, the fight versus the flight, do you think that that's related to arousal levels? Is that the higher arousal dogs are more likely to fight and the lower arousal dogs are more likely to bulk or freeze?
Lucia Lazarowski (52:32.884)
Yes.
Lucia Lazarowski (52:40.423)
Yeah, I can't speak based on data because we haven't been able to look at it yet, but we definitely anecdotally, that's exactly what we think. It does seem like, because part of what happens is that another trait that's really important is this high level of motivation and energy that's important for the dogs to be able to do these challenging tasks. And what happens is people tend to select for those.
Kristina Spaulding (52:43.66)
Yeah.
Lucia Lazarowski (53:08.023)
high energy, high motivation dogs that also brings along with it this high arousal. And it does seem like we see that selecting and breeding for that also pulls along with it. This is like general reactivity where they're just very quick to react. And that's part of where we also look at the recovery. So if a dog does have a quick kind of reaction, that's not necessarily a concern. If it very quickly recovers and the reaction wasn't a huge reaction as opposed to a dog that
Kristina Spaulding (53:08.234)
Yeah.
Kristina Spaulding (53:12.45)
Yes.
Kristina Spaulding (53:20.821)
Yes.
Lucia Lazarowski (53:37.515)
that reacts in a very sort of aggressive way and takes a long time to recover from it.
Kristina Spaulding (53:45.566)
Yeah, and for what it's worth, what you're discussing in working dogs, I feel like that maps perfectly onto the populations of dogs that I've worked with too, is that emotional reactivity in general appears to be problematic, whether it's associated with high arousal or low arousal. And it's the dogs that are... And of course, emotional reactivity, like, that's not a specifically defined term, but this...
Lucia Lazarowski (54:13.879)
I'm gonna go.
Kristina Spaulding (54:15.37)
strong emotional response to stimuli, to multiple different types of stimuli. That's my experience is that tends to be associated with decreased ability to cope with living in just pet homes as well. So, and I totally agree. Like in this case, the research is completely consistent with my experience is that is probably.
one of the primary factors in predicting a dog's ability to cope. Now, I don't know, I'm saying predicting their ability to cope. I don't know how early we can start to assess that and have it predict adult behavior, but certainly when if I'm doing an assessment of a dog and someone's telling me that they're having these really strong emotional responses, that's very quickly going to indicate to me that they're likely having a lot of behavioral challenges.
Lucia Lazarowski (54:48.247)
Mm-hmm.
Lucia Lazarowski (55:08.712)
Mm-hmm.
Kristina Spaulding (55:12.062)
So I'm trying to think of where to go next because we have limited time at this point. Let's talk, I'd like to still talk a little bit about some of these executive function skills. So cognitive flexibility and impulse control because that's something that you've mentioned as well. I think that those factors of cognitive flexibility and impulse control are
Lucia Lazarowski (55:33.163)
Mm-hmm.
Kristina Spaulding (55:41.275)
Also associated with likelihood of success, is that correct?
Lucia Lazarowski (55:45.575)
Yeah, so we've done a number of studies looking at kind of non-traditional working dog assessments using more cognitive tasks because we know that executive functions should be important for dog's work. So we know that flexibility is important because they need to be able to adapt to change in environments, they need to be able to problem solve. All of this is kind of part of dealing with...
frustration and challenges that can arise in work, impulse control, where dogs need to be able to focus on their task, not be distracted and wanna chase a bird. But what we're finding is that this is hard because by selecting four dogs, like I mentioned with the high energy, high motivation that is also carrying with it the arousal, when the dogs are in that state of arousal,
those executive functions kind of go out the window. So our research on that has been a little mixed where it doesn't always align with what you would expect, but we think it's all being influenced by this arousal factor, where it looks like the dog is performing poorly on this cognitive test, but it's probably because we're using the dog's favorite reward to test it, and it's getting really excited and very aroused, and it can't think and problem solve, and so it's performing poorly. But that dog actually is the one that's going to
Kristina Spaulding (56:45.132)
Yeah.
Right?
Lucia Lazarowski (57:12.219)
be selected because it's got that strong motivational drive.
Kristina Spaulding (57:16.51)
Yeah, and I think it's really hard to find that balance, right? It's because it's not one end or the other. You want the middle.
Lucia Lazarowski (57:28.627)
Yes, we call those the unicorn dogs.
Kristina Spaulding (57:32.626)
Exactly. And in case the listeners are wondering, this is consistent with that Yerkes-Dodson curve where there's this sweet spot in the middle where moderate levels of arousal are associated with highest performance. And I've looked, I haven't found a whole lot of research to back up.
Lucia Lazarowski (57:37.771)
Mmhmm.
Kristina Spaulding (57:53.89)
the Yerkes-Dodson curve, not that there's research that disproves it, it just doesn't seem like it's actually been studied a lot, but some of the work that you guys are talking about is consistent with that, right? Where it's, we can't have too much arousal because that interferes with this more cognitive aspects of these executive control skills, but then if you don't have enough, the dog's not motivated enough to engage in the task.
Lucia Lazarowski (58:22.043)
Yeah, and I think that's where in this population, we tend to have that higher end of the spectrum because motivation is so important. You really cannot have a dog that doesn't have the motivation. They're not gonna work out. And so we end up with dogs too high on that spectrum or that higher arousal. And not only does that interfere, like you said, with problem solving and the ability to think, but those dogs end up being really difficult to handle because they're just so, you know, very strong dogs that are
yanking their handler around, they're just very over the top and difficult to handle, difficult to train. When they're searching, they're very highly aroused and that's causing them to, they're searching too fast and they're missing targets or they're panting and they're missing targets because they can't pant and sniff effectively. And so a lot of problems related to that. And in terms of the research, so Emily Bray has a study that
was really interesting in showing that arousal can be related to like individual temperament differences where the guide dogs were very low on arousal, but getting them more excited actually helped them. And whereas pet dogs were the opposite, we've done a little bit of work, not directly looking at their performance in a detection task, but we did a similar study where dogs were, it was a problem solving task where dogs had to learn to
Kristina Spaulding (59:26.924)
Yeah.
Yeah. Right. Yep.
Lucia Lazarowski (59:49.503)
to obtain their reward by detouring around instead of taking a direct approach. So it was an inhibitory control test where they had to kind of go the long way instead of wanting to go straight because there was a barrier in the way. And what we were specifically looking at is what factors can influence arousal and then how that impacts performance. And we manipulated that by using a high value versus a low value reward. And so the dogs were tested either with a ball as their reward
or as food treats. And in this population, again, they're kind of bred for that really strong ball toy desire. When we found that when we used the ball, they were really bad at the task. They were just taking that direct approach, could not figure out they had to go around. Whereas when the treat was used, they were really good at it. Same dogs, and we counterbalanced the order. They could do it with the treat, they couldn't do it with the ball. And we think that is explained by the...
Kristina Spaulding (01:00:32.702)
All right.
Lucia Lazarowski (01:00:46.475)
ball just putting them in that state of arousal that they just couldn't problem solve. And so that has implications for training. Like I said earlier, ball tends to be the preferred more common reward because the dogs are so strongly motivated for it. But there is a time and place for using maybe a lower value reward. If you're working on something that requires more nuanced, subtle behaviors, or you want the dog in a lower state of arousal, you can kind of use different rewards to control that.
Kristina Spaulding (01:01:15.79)
Right, right. Yeah, it's interesting because just this morning, so I have one of these really high arousal dogs who I talk about a lot. And just this morning I threw a toy for him and it kinda got stuck in a particular location and he was trying to get it out and I was letting him work through it on his own so he gets that problem solving practice. And I was kind of surprised because he kept trying to get it out one way that wasn't working and he persisted at it.
And he's one of the smartest dogs I've ever known. And I was a little bit surprised that he pushed so hard. And eventually he figured it out, but it took quite a long time. And I wonder if it had been food, which he is much less motivated by, still motivated, but not like he is with toys. I wonder if he actually would have figured it out faster because, yeah, exactly. Yeah, so I didn't put it together.
Lucia Lazarowski (01:02:06.015)
Yeah, that's basically what this test was.
Lucia Lazarowski (01:02:11.947)
Hehehe
Kristina Spaulding (01:02:13.118)
until we had this conversation. But yeah, I think that's the kind of interesting real world example of the impact of arousal on problem solving.
Lucia Lazarowski (01:02:17.815)
Hehehe
Kristina Spaulding (01:02:22.774)
All right, so we're almost out of time. I do wanna give you the opportunity, if there's anything that you wanna say about cognitive and behavioral development in detection dog puppies and how that changes across development, I wanna give you an opportunity to say anything about that now before we move on to the closing questions.
Lucia Lazarowski (01:02:47.691)
I don't know that I had anything specific to say about that we haven't already covered other than talking about like early developmental periods in socialization.
Kristina Spaulding (01:02:49.634)
Okay.
Kristina Spaulding (01:02:57.903)
Um, that's probably kind of a longer topic.
Why don't we skip that? But I may very well have you back on at some point and then we can talk about those things then because we clearly didn't have an issue with finding enough to talk about because I think that's a really interesting topic as well. So I have two remaining questions then, they're the last two that I sent you. So to wrap up, what unanswered questions
Lucia Lazarowski (01:03:05.737)
Okay.
Lucia Lazarowski (01:03:10.291)
Sure.
Lucia Lazarowski (01:03:14.655)
Hahaha
Kristina Spaulding (01:03:33.434)
are at the top of your mind right now, and what do you think we should be focusing on next in terms of research on detection dogs and odor learning?
Lucia Lazarowski (01:03:45.139)
Yeah, so a lot of the work that we've done and in general has focused on sort of the beginning stages of the dog's career in terms of selection and training and puppy testing. But there's definitely a need to look at dog's performance and behavior across their career and lifespan into older age because we really don't know a lot about how their behavior
changes with old age and how that affects performance. So for example, how does their sense of smell change in older age? We know that in humans, it declines with age. It doesn't really seem to be any evidence of that happening in dogs because their sense of smell is so good that it's probably declines, any declines that would happen are probably happening way after the dog's lifespan anyways, but we just, we don't know. It's something that hasn't really been looked at. And just generally at what age
Kristina Spaulding (01:04:19.785)
Mm-hmm.
Lucia Lazarowski (01:04:42.599)
Should dogs be retiring? There's not a lot of consistency in the field or standards in what's the appropriate age to retire. And kind of related to that, does their ability, does their cognition change with age? Does their ability to learn decline with age? If for example, new threats came out that the dogs had to be trained on, can they learn? You know, we talked about their amazing ability to learn and remember odors. Is that still the case?
when they're older or things like extinction off of odor, something I've been curious about. And it's been kind of a hot topic now that certain drugs are becoming legal. Well, what do you do with these dogs that for their whole life have been finding these drugs? We know about extinction training, but we don't really know how reliable that might be. You know, do you have to retire the dog or is it possible to train them off of an odor after years of experience with it?
And just in general, we talked a lot about stress resilience, and we are hoping to select for dogs that are resilient and capable of working. But what are the impacts of working in those kind of stressful environments over time? Is working stressful? Is it enriching? I tend to think for at least purpose-bred dogs, it's probably enriching, and it's actually probably extending their lifespan and having cognitive...
protections against declines to be able to work, but those are all things that we just don't, we don't really know. And we're hoping, we are exploring and hoping to get answers to.
Kristina Spaulding (01:06:19.254)
Yeah, those are all really great questions. And I'm so glad that someone is out there researching them so that we can hopefully look forward to getting more information on those topics down the road. So you kind of closed off or you kind of wrapped up with talking about stress, resilience and the impacts of the job. What are some things that you think that working dog trainers and handlers can do right now to improve the wellbeing in the animals that they work with?
Lucia Lazarowski (01:06:22.23)
Hahaha
Lucia Lazarowski (01:06:49.703)
I would say to really focus on evidence-based training and to try and become educated on the principles of animal learning and behavior and apply those principles to training, focusing on sound methods, clear communication with the dog, because that's going to reduce frustration both in the dog and the handler, promote better learning and better well-being overall, and then also just...
enrichment in general. These dogs do love to work and enjoy what they do. Again, especially dogs that were bred for this kind of work, they really need to work. They need that outlet and being deprived of that could be frustrating. But at the same time, there does need to be a balance, you know, kind of a work-life balance. They do need some downtime and to have fun and be sort of disengaged from working, that I think would probably be the key to a long and successful career.
Kristina Spaulding (01:07:36.494)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Kristina Spaulding (01:07:49.906)
Excellent. Well, thank you so much. I really enjoyed talking to you. I find found this fascinating and obviously very applicable to working dogs. But also, I think a lot of what you said applies to other populations of dogs as well. So thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Lucia.
Lucia Lazarowski (01:08:09.387)
Thank you so much for having me.