Research Bites Podcast Kristina Spaulding, PhD, CAAB

In this episode, I speak with Doctor Clive Wynne. Dr. Wynne is Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University and Director of Research at Wolf Park, Indiana. He was educated at University College London and Edinburgh University in Scotland and has studied animal behavior in Britain, Germany, the U.S., and Australia in species ranging from pigeons to dunnarts (a mouse-sized marsupial). Several years ago he founded the Canine Cognition and Behavior Lab dedicated to the study of dogs and their wild relatives. As well as numerous scientific papers, he has also written for Psychology Today, American Scientist, the New York Times, and other outlets. His science has been featured on several TV shows such as National Geographic, Nova ScienceNow, and others. He is the author of the textbook Animal Cognition (now in a new edition) and former editor-in-chief of the journal Behavioural Processes. His most recent book is Dog is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You (Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2020). 
In this episode, we talk about the current state of dog behavior research, anthropomorphism, and the science of clicker training.

Dr. Wynne's page: https://www.clivewynne.com/
Arizona State University page: https://search.asu.edu/profile/2218677 

Your host: Kristina Spaulding, PhD, CAAB with Science Matters Academy of Animal Behavior, LLC

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Emily Bray, Ph.D. Dr. Bray is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Arizona Canine Cognition Center in the College of Veterinary Medicine and at Canine Companions, the largest US non-profit providing service dogs to people with disabilities. She earned her undergraduate degree at Duke University, completing a senior thesis at the Duke Canine Cognition Center investigating context specificity of inhibitory control in pet dogs. She then went on to earn a Ph.D. from the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. For her dissertation, she partnered with The Seeing Eye—the oldest guide dog school in the United States—to conduct a longitudinal study investigating the development of behavior and cognition in dogs. Most recently, in her postdoctoral research, she develops and implements cognitive tasks in hundreds of dogs from Canine Companions' population.

In this episode, we discuss development and cognition in puppies, and the Many Dogs Project (it is SO cool!).

Dr. Bray also references a project she is involved in called the Dog Aging Project. They are recruiting dogs of all ages. You can get more information at www.dogagingproject.org

You can get more information on my Unlocking Resilience course here, and learn more about Dr. Spaulding and Science Matters Academy at www.sciencemattersllc.com.

In this episode, I discuss a concept called cognitive flexibility. Cognitive flexibility allows animals to adjust their behavior to a changing environment - and it's very important for resilience!

Learn more about what cognitive flexibility is, how it impacts behavior, and how we can improve it.

Click for more information on the Advanced Consulting Course and Research Bites.

Here are links to some of the papers I discuss in the podcast:

Gelfo, F. (2019). Does experience enhance cognitive flexibility? An overview of the evidence provided by the environmental enrichment studies. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 13, 150. https://doi.org/10.3389/FNBEH.2019.00150/BIBTEX

Gökçen, G., Arslan, C., & Tras, Z. (2020). Examining the Relationship between Patience, Emotion Regulation Difficulty and Cognitive Flexibility. Online Submission, 7(7), 131–152. https://doi.org/10.46827/ejes.v7i7.3160

Kalia, V., & Knauft, K. (2020). Emotion regulation strategies modulate the effect of adverse childhood experiences on perceived chronic stress with implications for cognitive flexibility. PLOS ONE, 15(6), e0235412. https://doi.org/10.1371/JOURNAL.PONE.0235412

Your host: Kristina Spaulding, PhD, CAAB with Science Matters Academy of Animal Behavior, LLC

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Sasha Protopopova. She is an Assistant Professor and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Chair holder in Animal Welfare at The University of British Columbia (UBC). If that sounds familiar, that’s because my last guest, Dr. von Keyserlingk is at the same University, in the same department. They are doing a lot of great work there! Dr. Protopopova is a Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist and has a PhD in Applied Behavior Analysis from the University of Florida. Her research interests are in improving animal shelter practices, improving companion animal welfare through the development of behavioral interventions in shelters as well as pet homes, and assessing and improving the well-being of dogs working in assistance roles. In this episode, we discuss increasing the adoptability of shelter dogs, the human side of animal sheltering and rescue, and ethical issues related to domestic animals.

This is a shortened version of the podcast. The full version of the podcast is available to Research Bites members. You can get more information on Research Bites and other educational opportunities at www.sciencemattersllc.com

In this episode, I use my own dog Finn as a case study for discussing several different aspects of behavior. I talk about emotional reactivity, affective style, and impulse control.

Here is a link to the study about sleep and brain development in dogs that I refer to in the podcast.

You can find transcripts here and more information on additional learning opportunities at www.sciencemattersllc.com. 

In addition to this podcast, I also have a blog. I am posting one blog post a month and about one podcast episode a month. That’s really not as frequently as I’d like to be posting either one. But, I am currently maxed out as far as my time goes. I think the podcast is extremely valuable because it is a wonderful platform for bringing research directly to those of you living and working with dogs. At the same time, I’d hate to let the blog go entirely.
So, I’ve worked out a compromise, of sorts. I plan to start to do some solo episodes of the podcast where it is just me talking about various topics related to applied animal behavior science. Essentially, a spoken version of the blog. (Don’t worry – you’ll still be getting the interviews as well). I will then post transcriptions of the podcast to the blog space. Now you will be able to choose between listening to the podcast while you multi-task or finding a few moments of downtime to enjoy reading the content.

In this episode, I talk a little about myself and my vision as well as how science can enhance our experience-based knowledge and take us in new and unexpected directions. You can find transcripts here and more information on additional learning opportunities at www.sciencemattersllc.com.