So these videos will help you understand each of the games and how to play them with your dog. And there'll be online instructions as well that walk you through it step by step. A little bit of stuff that you need like dog treats and balls. Household things that everyone has available, but also will help you record your dog's responses. All of those responses, after they are recorded, and after you finish all the games, will then be analyzed and compared to all the other dogs that played these games before you. And, you will then find out, where does your dog sit relative to other dogs in all these different types of intelligence? Because the ten games are organized into five different cognitive dimensions. Remember that we've talked about what cognition is. One of the important things that cognition is, is there are different types of intelligence. So, we have the ten games. There's two games for each of the five types of intelligence we help you measure. One is empathy, one is communication, cunning, memory, and reasoning. For each of those types of intelligence, there's the two games that I showed you before. And what we do with the data that you record after you watch the videos and play these games with your dogs, is we give you your cognitive profile. Your dog's data is compared to all the other dogs in our database and you find out what is it that your dog really is in terms of its profile? How does it solve problems? Not is it smart enough. What are the types of intelligence that your dog really relies on on a daily basis? And, you get to find out their profile. There are nine of them. Everything from an ace, to a star-gazer, to a socialite, to an Einstein. And, those profiles are based on your dog's independent problem solving abilities, and the social strategies they use. And it's really fun, because you get to find out what dogs are out there that are actually more like your dogs cognitively? You might think that because your dog is a certain breed, that it's probably cognitively like another dog of the same breed. But that doesn't tend to be the case it's turning out. And so, it's really fun to know what your dog really is. What is it that's in that book, that's not just on the cover? So, after you play all the games, you find out, you enter your results, and you find out your dog's cognitive profile. You get a report that's generated, that explains each dimension, how your dog Compares to other dogs. And then also, detailed information about why we chose these games and what they were based on, and what it means for you in your relationship. Now, again, this is not required. I think it would just be fun as a laboratory tool, for you to learn exactly what it is I'm talking about when I'm talking about dog cognition. And we're gonna go through a lot of different games that explain how dogs think. You can do it at home and see what you think about not just the games and not just about the science, but about your dog. So, I've doe this with my own dog, of course. Before I played the game, and I think this is one of the most fun things to do, is before you play these games, you can try to predict in each of the five types of intelligence: empathy, communication, cunning, memory, and reasoning. Where do you think your dog's gonna fall? I did this with my dog. And my predictions were that Tazzy or Tasmania, he'd probably be a little low in empathy. He'd be an amazing communicator. Pretty cunning. I imagine his memory is pretty good. And reasoning, not so much, was my guess. Well, it ends up that this is his profile. He's a socialite, that's his overall profile. And if you look at each dimension of his cognition and what he's really relying on, I was really way off. He is exceptionally bonded to us, and I didn't realize that before we played this series of game. And I thought he really had a decent memory, but he's not relying on his memory at all. So, that's really important. Whether it's I'm trying to train him. In a sense that I'm wondering why when I say sit and stay, he wanders off. Well, he's not using his working memory the way that I thought he probably was. And on bonded, it's good to know he's bonded. Because that helps me understand that when he's making eye contact with me, he's not just trying to eat my sandwich. He's probably just trying to connect with me in a way that I didn't know before. So that's what Dognition's all about, is getting to know your dog better. Find out who's actually sleeping in your bed with you. But at the same time, you're contributing to the larger endeavor of us understanding all dogs. You'll see in a later lecture, how we're using this data to make discoveries about dog psychology that we could not make any other way. And of course, all the data from Dognition is freely available online. You go to explore the data at dognition.com. And you can play and do different queries on all the data from people who've previously played. So, Dognition, what is it? It can be used like a laboratory for this class, but of course it's not required. It allows you to use much of the science we'll discuss about dog psychology in general. But you can actually think about it in relation to your own dog. Dognition is a citizen science company. So that means that we're actually collecting data from people like you, playing these games, the same games. And we're learning things about dogs that we could not in any other way. All our data is publicly available. We're publishing papers. And we're hoping to make discoveries about things that you and I both care about that we couldn't make otherwise. And there's a free start. If you go to www.dognition.com\mooc, M-O-O-C, you can get started and play the first two cognitive dimensions, Empathy and Communication with Your Dog. If you decide to continue on, that's great too. But you don't have to, of course. And that the ten games that you play when you play the complete Dognition experience are based on previous published research and it helps you measure five types of intelligence for your dog. So that's Dognition, and I hope that if you decide to use it as a laboratory for this class, that you enjoy it.
