 The Canine Science Collaboratory is a group at ASU that studies the behavior of dogs in their interaction with human beings. And when I came to ASU, I chose to call it a collaboratory, rather than just a laboratory, because I think that the only way we're going to really understand dogs and how they live with people is if we get together a diverse group of experts with very wide-ranging sorts of expertise. As it happens, dogs are the only species other than monkeys that spontaneously develop something like Alzheimer's disease, what we call canine cognitive dysfunction. It's very, very sad. It's very sad to see. So we are studying this both because we hope that our experiments will enable the development of new treatments, but also our hope is that through research on dogs, we will also be able to help human beings. In the lab, we get to interact with a lot of people from the public that bring in their dogs as volunteers for our research. So they're very excited about what we're doing, and they get to come in and watch their dogs perform these tasks. We began to study how dogs remember things in a maze. And so we put the dogs into a very standard maze environment where they have to move around and remember where they have already found food and where there is still food waiting to be discovered. We keep a record of what they're doing by making check marks on paper as they go around, and we also have a video camera up on the wall so that we have a permanent record of everything the dog did. So the dog is basically simply having its behavior observed. No dog is ever coerced to do anything it doesn't want to do. If the dog is uncomfortable, then we just thank the dog and the owner and send them home. So I was quite surprised to find that we see that age is a very important factor in memory in the maze task. The older dogs, even though they look quite healthy, are nonetheless making two or three times as many mistakes as they look for food in the maze. One project we want to move on to next is to look at how that differs between different breeds of dogs. Because one very interesting thing is that in dogs, life expectancy varies by 100% between short-lived breeds, like great Danes, that only are expected to live seven or eight years, and longer-lived breeds, which includes most mutts and many smaller breeds of dog, that may often live to be 14, 15 years old. So we are asking the question, if you take a great Dane, if you take a breed of dog that's only expected to live to be eight, and you test that dog at seven years of age, does it make lots of mistakes in the maze, like an old dog generally would, or does it make fewer mistakes because its brain is only seven years old? So this is something that we are urgently focusing on as a next step, is to study different breeds of dog. I love it when my students come in and they've got some new data, and we look at the numbers, and I love the science discovery. And to be able to actually help dogs and help people with their dogs, it's a very lucky situation to be able to meld a technical scientific enthusiasm with something that really matters to me and I know to thousands of other people too. It's a great experience. I get to network with a lot of people that are involved in other research as well.