Predicting success in assistance dog training for blind and deaf individuals: Is early sensitivity to human verbal and gestural communicative cues pre

predictive of success in assistance dog training?

Sight and hearing loss affect millions of people worldwide. Individuals with these conditions
not only face daily physical challenges but also psychological difficulties with loneliness and
poor mental health. Partnering with an assistance dog can help alleviate some of these
challenges and help to significantly improve wellbeing and facilitate positive social
interactions in blind and deaf individuals. In the UK, the training and care of assistance dogs
relies solely on charitable funds. Unfortunately, training assistance dogs is extremely costly,
partly because less than half of the dogs who begin training successfully complete the
programme.
Previous research aiming to understand reasons for assistance dog failure has focused on
temperament and behavioural characteristics. However, behavioural traits are not stable
over development and therefore may not be useful as an early predictor of a successful
assistance dog.
Up to now, minimal research has focused on cognitive abilities of successful assistance
dogs. As previous research has found cognitive abilities to be stable over development, they
may be ideal early markers to use in selection of dogs for formal training. If we better
understood the cognitive profile of successful assistance dogs and the developmental
trajectories of those cognitive abilities, then we may be able to create a test battery that
could be used to identify the most promising candidates to put forward into the costly training
programmes. Within cognition, dog sensitivity to human vocal and visual communicative
signals is key to success in training and meeting the needs of their eventual partner, yet this
aspect of social cognition has not been adequately examined as a predictor of assistance
dog success in previous research.
Proposed study
We will partner with two charities, Guide Dogs UK and Hearing Dogs for Deaf People, to
ultimately try and establish an early social cognition screening process to assess assistance
dog suitability, to reduce money wasted on training dogs who are unlikely to succeed and

allowing more people to be helped. In order to realise this aim we will first conduct semi-
structured interviews with experienced trainers for these charities and conduct thematic

analysis on the responses to identify a range of cognitive skills that might be important for
dogs passing formal training. We will then conduct a longitudinal study with a sample of 200
dogs bred by Guide Dogs and Hearing Dogs for Deaf People. We will test dogs at multiple
points over their development, to establish a better understanding of how dog social
cognition, including dog-human communicative abilities, develop over the first year of life.
Critically we will then examine predictive relationships between their performance on social
cognition tasks at different ages and their success in their respective training programmes.
Proposed methods
We aim to test the sample on a battery of social cognition tasks at 7-8 weeks, 6 months and

12 months. The test battery will include sensitivity to human communicative cues (dog-
directed speech, gestural signals) and reliance on humans to assist with problem solving, in

addition to other tasks informed by our interviews with experienced dog trainers. The
charities will provide data on the performance and ultimate success of the dog in their formal
training programmes.
Proposed analysis
I will use Generalised Linear Mixed Models to examine whether (i) performance on tasks at
early timepoints predicts performance on the same tasks at later timepoints and (ii) variation

Ella Williamson

in performance on the social cognition tasks at three timepoints can explain variation in
success on the formal assistance dog training programme