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.

For more information, please check out my website and social media links below!

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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

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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

For more information, please check out my website and social media links below!

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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. 

For more information, please check out my website and social media links below!

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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. 

For more information, please check out my website and social media links below!

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

Every once in a while I like to bring in voices from other disciplines to round out our knowledge of behavior. For this episode, I am speaking with a well-respected farm animal welfare researcher. Dr. Marina (Nina) von Keyserlingk is a Professor and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Chair holder in Animal Welfare at The University of British Columbia (UBC) where she has co-directed the Animal Welfare Program since 2002. Together with her colleagues and students their research focuses on assessing animal welfare and developing practical methods of improving the welfare of animals. She has published in excess of 300 peer reviewed scientific papers, contributed to the training of over 100 highly qualified individuals and is a frequent and enthusiastic speaker for academic and professional audiences. She was the 2018 recipient of the prestigious Hans Sigrist Research Prize (Bern, Switzerland) for her outstanding contributions to the sustainability of food animal systems. She is considered one of the world leading experts in farm animal welfare. Please enjoy my conversation with Dr. von Keyserlingk as we discuss issues related to the welfare and ethics of farm and companion 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

For more information, please check out my website and social media links below!

• Website: https://sciencemattersllc.com/
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Your host: Kristina Spaulding, PhD, CAAB with Science Matters Academy of Animal Behavior, LLC

Today’s guest is Dr. Mindy Waite. Dr. Waite is a Board-Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist (CAAB) and a certified professional dog trainer (CPDT-KA) located in Milwaukee, WI. She is a lecturer in behavior analysis in the Psychology Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she performs research on companion canine behavior. Her early studies focused on the prevalence, function, and function-based interventions for mouthing behavior in dogs. Current studies are assessing simple, owner-implemented food preference assessments for dogs and also training dogs to cooperatively engage in basic veterinary care. Her research has received several awards, including the Marian Breland-Bailey Award and Fear Free Award, as well as competitive funding from Fear Free. She also lectures in the Applied Animal Behavior and Welfare program at Virginia Tech’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She received her BS in Genetics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her MS in Behavior Analysis from Marquette University and her PhD in Molecular Biology (mouse brain development) from the University of Michigan.

We talk about so many things in this episode that it’s impossible to list them all here, but here are just some of the things we discussed: how behavior analysis works, mouthing – which dogs do it and why they do it – and defining the function of behavior. 

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

For more information, please check out my website and social media links below!

• Website: https://sciencemattersllc.com/
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Your host: Kristina Spaulding, PhD, CAAB with Science Matters Academy of Animal Behavior, LLC

Today’s guest is Dr. Erica Feuerbacher is an Associate Professor in Animal & Poultry Sciences at Virginia Tech and director of the Applied Animal Behavior & Welfare Lab, where she works with dogs and horses. She also coordinates the online Masters's program in Applied Animal Behavior & Welfare at Virginia Tech. She earned her Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of Florida in the UF Canine Cognition and Behavior Lab and her Master’s in Behavior Analysis at the University of North Texas in the Organization for Reinforcement Contingencies with Animals. She is a Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist, a Board Certified Behavior Analyst, and a Certified Professional Dog Trainer. Her research and publications focus on understanding domestic animal behavior and learning from a behavior analytic perspective, using applied behavior analysis to solve behavioral issues in dogs and horses, and identifying interventions that improve shelter dog welfare. She is passionate about humane, effective animal training, and working with owners, trainers, and shelter staff to improve our interactions with animals.

In this episode, we discuss types of reinforcers and their effectiveness as well as addressing stress and welfare in shelter dogs.

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

For more information, please check out my website and social media links below!

• Website: https://sciencemattersllc.com/
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Your host: Kristina Spaulding, PhD, CAAB with Science Matters Academy of Animal Behavior, LLC

Today’s guest is Dr. Ádám Miklósi. He is a full professor and the leader of the Department of Ethology at the Eötvös University in Budapest (Hungary). He is also the co-founder and leader of the Family Dog Project ( http://familydogproject.elte.hu ) which studies human-dog interaction from an ethological perspective. In recent years he has also become interested in the automatization of measuring dog behavior and his research group has pioneered  studying the neural and genetic aspects of dog behavior using non-invasive methods like fMRI and EEG.  

Over more than twenty years The Family Dog Project published over 180 scientific papers, and organized several conferences. 

In 2014 Miklósi published the second edition of an academic volume entitled Dog Behavior, Evolution and Cognition by Oxford University Press that summarizes the most recent status on dog oriented research. More recently, together with his colleagues, he published The Dog: A Natural History with Ivy Press, London.  For more information on Dr. Miklósi and his lab visit: https://familydogproject.elte.hu/

In this episode we talk about meeting the needs of dogs, approaches to training, imitation, self-awareness, exceptional word learning capabilities in certain dogs, and much more.

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

For more information, please check out my website and social media links below!

• Website: https://sciencemattersllc.com/
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Your host: Kristina Spaulding, PhD, CAAB with Science Matters Academy of Animal Behavior, LLC

My guest today is Dr. Monique Udell is a Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist and an Associate Professor of Animal & Rangeland Sciences at Oregon State University, where she directs the Human-Animal Interactions Lab and teaches courses on Animal Behavior, Cognition and Learning. Much of her work focuses on the development of human-animal bonds, with wild and domesticated animals, and the impact that these bonds can have on the behavior and success of both species. She also studies the social behavior and cognition of a variety of species including cats, dogs, wolves and sheep. In addition, Dr. Udell is a Co-director of an imitation-based dog training intervention program dedicated to improving the physical activity and quality of life of children with and without developmental disabilities and their family dog. To find out more visit: https://thehumananimalbond.com/ In this episode we talk about a variety of topics including problem-solving, how dogs attend to humans and forming secure attachments.

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

For more information, please check out my website and social media links below!

• Website: https://sciencemattersllc.com/
• Research Bites: https://sciencemattersllc.com/research-bites
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