Do ‘optimistic’ versus ‘pessimistic’ medical detection dogs perform differently?

A new, exploratory study has revealed statistical links between the performance of medical detection dogs and their scores on behavioral and affective tests, finding that more “optimistic” dogs tended to perform better overall on detection tasks, but “pessimistic” dogs had higher scent detection specificity. Sharyn Bistre Dabbah of the University of Bristol, U.K., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One on April 9, 2025.

Animal researchers commonly use a…

Continue Reading


News Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *