Dog Lab at the University of Sussex

Calling all dog and cat owners!

Researchers at the University of Liverpool are studying the approaches taken by dog and cat owners in keeping their pets healthy and the use of preventative care. If you are an adult in the UK interested in taking part in this research or would like to learn more, please email [email protected]

We are still looking for dogs and owners to help us with this fun study - if your dog has good hearing, and you can come to our Falmer lab for a short visit (~30 minutes) please drop us a line on [email protected]

Calling all dog owners in the Brighton and Hove area! We are recruiting dogs and owners for a study based in our lab in Falmer. All dogs with good hearing are welcome! Please contact Anna on [email protected] for more details and to sign up!

Calling all dog owners in the Brighton and Hove area! We are recruiting dogs and owners for a study based in our lab in Falmer. All dogs with good hearing are welcome! Please contact Anna on [email protected] for more details and to sign up!

Our new paper on pitch-size crossmodal correspondences (where high pitches are associated with small things and low pitches with big things) in dogs is out today in Royal Society Open Science (free to access) https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.211647 . We found that dogs were better at locating an object which made a sound when the pitch of the sound and the size of the object it was coming from matched in an intuitive way (so e.g., a big object made a low-pitched sound and a small object made a high-pitched sound). Dogs were also quicker to react when the sound-pitch pairing matched this intuitive regularity, and slower when it didn't!

Calling all dog breeders and vets who have experience with very young puppies (pre-weaning). Our friends at the University of Saint-Etienne in France need your help with a study on puppy vocalisations - details below! 👇

In a research study led by the ENES lab at the University of Saint-Etienne, France, we would like to understand how humans perceive puppy vocalisations.

To answer this question we are looking for people who work professionally with dogs (dog breeders, vets) and who are familiar with whines produced by puppies younger than 2 months of age.

The study includes a short online survey and a listening experiment, which you can do from home. It's available in English or French via the links below, and takes about 15 minutes.

Study in English: https://cogsci.se/experiments/pp1/pp3_english.html
Study in French: https://cogsci.se/experiments/pp1/pp3_french.html

Your expertise and participation will help scientists to uncover the secret communicative 'codes' of animal calls, including how they encode important information such as distress or pain. We thank you immensely for your time!

Please contact the lead researcher with any questions: Mathilde Massenete, [email protected]

In case you missed it, in October 2021 we published an Open Access paper where we investigated how dogs respond to distress cries from infants (either puppies or human babies) if the frequency range of the cries (i.e. the pitch at which the infant is crying) matches the typical pitch of a crying puppy, or a baby. We found that dogs responded much more strongly if they heard a cry that matched the pitch of a crying puppy - even if the crier was actually a human baby, meaning that the pitch of the cry, and not so much who the crier is, are important to the dogs! Perhaps unsurprisingly, female dogs responded more to the cries than male dogs. Check out the paper for full details here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-98967-w

*****NEW STUDY*****
We are looking for Competition Obedience enthusiasts to complete this short survey: https://universityofsussex.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bf05WwR963QmkLA

Calling all English speaking dog owners! We still need participants to take part in this study - please get in touch ([email protected])! It only takes a few minutes! Thanks so much!

***NEW ONLINE STUDY***
We need dogs and owners to take part in our new online/ remote study! E mail us for more details ([email protected])...

Hi, anyone looking for an online study? University of Lincoln is recruiting!

We are still searching for participants to fill in our survey asking for canine leisure activities

https://unioflincoln.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_43mXTu4SIpUyPEp

We are particularly looking for dolichocephalic and brachycephalic dog breeds such as , , , , or

We still need plenty of participants to take part in this online study! If you own a dog and speak English as your first language please get in touch! [email protected] 🐶📈👨‍🔬

***NEW ONLINE STUDY***
We need dogs and owners to take part in our new online/ remote study! E mail us for more details ([email protected])...