What we have done
What we want to do
In the last years, we have contributed to understanding the canine cognition. Our results were important on the applied point of view in improving the communicative exchange between humans and dogs, with a direct positive effect on the welfare of the dogs and their human families. Our researches have made an important contribution in this field showing that dogs prefer to communicate by gestures when they have to choose against words. We also demonstrated that dogs are able to smell and reproduce our emotions via chemosignals (which are specific molecules produced when we fell an emotion). Other studies contributed to elucidate some aspects of the attachment bond and the social learning. For more information see Publications and Press review pages.
We would like to develop some new projects about the emotional exchange between dogs and humans. In particular, we would like to compare the effects of the chemo-signals collected by humans and dogs under different emotional status, as well as the effects of visual and acoustic emotional signals. Considering that dogs live in an olfactory world, we suspect that the olfactory information will be more important than images and sounds. It will be very important to disentangle such aspects since our olfactory power doesn’t give us a full access to the dogs’ world.
What do we need
To continue our research, we would need specific ethologic rooms equipped with cameras, computers and different type of apparatus for diffusing chemo-signals, to project images and produce sounds. We would also need specific instruments for non-invasive physiological measurements, such as heart rate monitors, and thermographic camera for the measure of the body temperature, which give information about the emotional activation of dogs. Of course, we would also need to support fellowships for the best-qualified graduate students to be enrolled in the research.