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

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predictive of success in assistance dog training?Sight and hearing loss affect millions of people worldwide. Individuals with these conditionsnot only face daily physical challenges but also psychological difficulties with loneliness andpoor mental health. Partnering with an assistance dog can help alleviate some of thesechallenges and help to significantly improve wellbeing and facilitate positive socialinteractions in blind and deaf individuals. In the UK, the training and care of assistance dogsrelies solely on charitable funds. Unfortunately, training assistance dogs is extremely costly,partly because less than half of the dogs who begin training successfully complete theprogramme.Previous research aiming to understand reasons for assistance dog failure has focused ontemperament and behavioural characteristics. However, behavioural traits are not stableover development and therefore may not be useful as an early predictor of a successfulassistance dog.Up to now, minimal research has focused on cognitive abilities of successful assistancedogs. As previous research has found cognitive abilities to be stable over development, theymay be ideal early markers to use in selection of dogs for formal training. If we betterunderstood the cognitive profile of successful assistance dogs and the developmentaltrajectories of those cognitive abilities, then we may be able to create a test battery thatcould be used to identify the most promising candidates to put forward into the costly trainingprogrammes. Within cognition, dog sensitivity to human vocal and visual communicativesignals is key to success in training and meeting the needs of their eventual partner, yet thisaspect of social cognition has not been adequately examined as a predictor of assistancedog success in previous research.Proposed studyWe will partner with two charities, Guide Dogs UK and Hearing Dogs for Deaf People, toultimately try and establish an early social cognition screening process to assess assistancedog suitability, to reduce money wasted on training dogs who are unlikely to succeed andallowing 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 thematicanalysis on the responses to identify a range of cognitive skills that might be important fordogs passing formal training. We will then conduct a longitudinal study with a sample of 200dogs bred by Guide Dogs and Hearing Dogs for Deaf People. We will test dogs at multiplepoints over their development, to establish a better understanding of how dog socialcognition, including dog-human communicative abilities, develop over the first year of life.Critically we will then examine predictive relationships between their performance on socialcognition tasks at different ages and their success in their respective training programmes.Proposed methodsWe aim to test the sample on a battery of social cognition tasks at 7-8 weeks, 6 months and12 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, inaddition to other tasks informed by our interviews with experienced dog trainers. Thecharities will provide data on the performance and ultimate success of the dog in their formaltraining programmes.Proposed analysisI will use Generalised Linear Mixed Models to examine whether (i) performance on tasks atearly timepoints predicts performance on the same tasks at later timepoints and (ii) variationElla Williamsonin performance on the social cognition tasks at three timepoints can explain variation insuccess on the formal assistance dog training programme