Citizen Science Spotlight: Family Dog Project

GamesWithWords Admin
GamesWithWords
Published in
3 min readSep 30, 2016

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The day I visited SciStarter to scope out cool citizen science projects, I was met with lots of pictures of dogs. Turns out, the “projects of the day” featured on the homepage that day were all dog-focused projects, and I became very intrigued. Dogs and Citizen Science?!

Turns out there are more than plenty of dog research groups across the world — many of which involve citizen science in their projects! To explore where those dog study headlines really come from, I decided to explore one particular research group.

Meet the Family Dog Project

The Family Dog Project is one of the largest dog research groups in the world. It is comprised of 3 institutions: MTA TTK Comparative Behavioural Research Group, MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group, and Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. The head is Professor Ádám Miklósi who is based in the Department of Ethology at Eötvös Loránd.

Founded in 1994, the Family Dog Project studies not only dog behavior but the dog-human relationship as well. Some of their research topics include: dog vocalizations, dog attachment behavior, dog-human gestural communication, dog social learning from humans, and ethorobotics.

Why does studying dogs matter?

Known as “man’s best friend,” dogs are clearly tied very closely to their human counterparts. Because of the longstanding partnership and pet ownership aspect of dogs and humans throughout thousands of years, the Family Dog Project believes that dogs have evolved to adapt to anthropogenic environments. Studying dogs has allowed scientists to investigate how dogs have responded to human behavior and how humans have contributed to the strong dog-human bond. In their experience, dogs are able to serve as a model for understanding human social behavior.

Additionally, some applied benefits of dog research include improvements for guide dogs for the blind (based on cooperation and dog-training studies) and improvements for assistance and social robots (using dog-human relationships as a basis for creating interactive robots)!

How do they study dogs?

Of course, the Family Dog Project doesn’t own thousands of dogs (or definitely not a lab space large enough to hold thousands of dogs!), so a big part of their dog behavior studies relies on citizen science. Specifically, dog owners (and previous dog owners) can serve as participants and scientists themselves to study dog behavior and aid the project’s research whether it is in-person with their dogs or online by filling out dog behavior and personality questionnaires!

Any findings?

Lots. Since its inception over two decades ago, the Family Dog Project has gone through several citizen science projects and has published over 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals.

Some popular findings:

-A dog’s “guilty look” does not actually correspond with a dog’s knowledge of a misdeed.

-Training a dog? The “Do As I Do” (dog training through imitation) method is one of the more effective dog training techniques.

-By analyzing dog barking through statistical and computational methods, characteristics such as gender and age of a dog can be identified.

Here’s a full list of the Family Dog Project’s publications.

How can I participate?

To see what current questionnaires are open, be sure to check out the Family Dog Project’s website, under “Participate in our Research.”

If you’re in Europe — specifically near Northern Italy or Budapest, Hungary — they have in-person dog research opportunities for you, also listed on their website.

P.S. — To find out more about dog research groups across the world and how you can contribute, check out this link.

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