Dora Szabo

Dora Szabo
Eötvös Loránd University · Department of Ethology

PhD

About

31
Publications
18,553
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
674
Citations
Additional affiliations
August 2016 - present
Eötvös Loránd University
Position
  • Researcher
Description
  • https://familydogproject.elte.hu/senior-family-dog-project/
September 2014 - August 2015
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Position
  • Research Assistant
September 2006 - August 2014
Eötvös Loránd University
Position
  • Student
Education
September 2015 - December 2018
Eötvös Loránd University
Field of study
  • Ethology
October 2012 - October 2014
University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna
Field of study
  • Human-Animal Interactions
September 2008 - July 2012
Eötvös Loránd University
Field of study
  • Biology

Publications

Publications (31)
Article
In recent decades, typical and pathologic behavioral and mental aging in family dogs has received increased attention. This article reviews the literature and highlights methodological inconsistences in this field. Most methodological concerns originate from disregarding the interaction of proximate and ultimate causes of this phenomenon. The liter...
Article
Full-text available
During speech processing, human listeners can separately analyze lexical and intonational cues to arrive at a unified representation of communicative content. The evolution of this capacity can be best investigated by comparative studies. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we explored whether and how dog brains segregate and integrate lex...
Article
Full-text available
A fundamental precept of the scientific method is reproducibility of methods and results, and there is growing concern over the failure to reproduce significant results. Family dogs have become a favoured species in comparative cognition research, but they may be subject to cognitive differences arising from genetic (breeding lines) or cultural dif...
Article
Comparative behavioural research in canines may have the potential to add a new impetus for cognitive research on animals and humans. However this is a very young area that needs also re-thinking of old problems and questions which have been around for a long time. In this short essay we tackle three partially related problems: (1) interpretation...
Article
Full-text available
Efforts to counteract age-related decline have resulted in the emergence of various interventions. However, everyday benefits are rarely reported in elderly people. Dogs provide an excellent model for studying aging and interventions due to their similarities to humans. Our aim was to investigate whether a combined physical and cognitive interventi...
Article
Full-text available
The current study investigates whether there are statistically independent age-related influences on the canine cognitive structure and how individual factors moderate cognitive aging on both cross-sectional and longitudinal samples. A battery of seven tasks was administered to 129 pet dogs, on which exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses wer...
Article
Full-text available
Compared to the field of human fMRI, knowledge about functional networks in dogs is scarce. In this paper, we present the first anatomically-defined ROI (region of interest) based functional network map of the companion dog brain. We scanned 33 awake dogs in a “task-free condition”. Our trained subjects, similarly to humans, remain willingly motion...
Preprint
Full-text available
The complex human environment results in a hard-to-bridge gap between human and animal studies on general cognitive abilities ( g ; colloquially often referred to as “intelligence”). Pet dogs are adapted to our environment, but a convincing demonstration of g is missing. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses on seven tasks revealed a hierarc...
Article
Full-text available
Forming eye contact is important in dog–human communication. In this study we measured what factors affect dogs’ propensity for forming eye contact with an experimenter. We investigated the effect of [1] cephalic index (head shape’s metric, indicator of higher visual acuity at the centre of the visual field), [2] breed function (visual cooperativen...
Article
Full-text available
Conspecific-preference in social perception is evident for multiple sensory modalities and in many species. There is also a dedicated neural network for face processing in primates. Yet, the evolutionary origin and the relative role of neural species-sensitivity and face-sensitivity in visuo-social processing are largely unknown. In this comparativ...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Recent studies suggest that clinically sound ventriculomegaly in dogs could be a preliminary form of the clinically significant hydrocephalus. We evaluated changes of ventricular volumes in awake functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) trained dogs with indirectly assessed cognitive abilities over time (thus avoiding the use of an...
Article
Full-text available
Human brains process lexical meaning separately from emotional prosody of speech at higher levels of the processing hierarchy. Recently we demonstrated that dog brains can also dissociate lexical and emotional prosodic information in human spoken words. To better understand the neural dynamics of lexical processing in the dog brain, here we used an...
Article
Full-text available
Visual and auditory impairments can have a large impact on performance in cognitive tests. It is important to evaluate the sensory capacities of dogs before enrolling them in cognitive tests, in order to exclude sensory impairment as confounding effect. Therefore we designed multiple non-invasive testing paradigms to detect subjects with potential...
Article
Full-text available
In both humans and dogs sleep spindle occurrence between acquisition and recall of a specific memory correlate with learning performance. However, it is not known whether sleep spindle characteristics are also linked to performance beyond the span of a day, except in regard to general mental ability in humans. Such a relationship is likely, as both...
Article
Full-text available
In the human speech signal, cues of speech sounds and voice identities are conflated, but they are processed separately in the human brain. The processing of speech sounds and voice identities is typically performed by non-primary auditory regions in humans and non-human primates. Additionally, these processes exhibit functional asymmetry in humans...
Article
Full-text available
Dogs are looking at and gaining information from human faces in a variety of contexts. Next to behavioral studies investigating the topic, recent fMRI studies reported face sensitive brain areas in dogs' temporal cortex. However, these studies used whole heads as stimuli which contain both internal (eyes, nose, mouth) and external facial features (...
Article
Full-text available
The dog has been suggested as a possible model for personality development over the lifespan, however, we know little about how aging may shape their personality or the magnitude of age-related changes. Previously we established that aging influences multiple dog demographics, which could also affect how personality traits change across different a...
Article
Full-text available
Age-related changes in the brain can alter how emotions are processed. In humans, valence specific changes in attention and memory were reported with increasing age, i.e. older people are less attentive toward and experience fewer negative emotions, while processing of positive emotions remains intact. Little is yet known about this “positivity eff...
Article
Full-text available
Resting-state networks are spatially distributed, functionally connected brain regions. Studying these networks gives us information about the large-scale functional organization of the brain and alternations in these networks are considered to play a role in a wide range of neurological conditions and aging. To describe resting-state networks in d...
Article
Full-text available
Several studies on age-related cognitive decline in dogs involve laboratory dogs and prolonged training. We developed two spatial tasks that required a single 1-h session. We tested 107 medium-large sized dogs: “young” (N=41, aged 2.5–6.5 years) and “old” (N=66, aged 8–14.5 years). Our results indicated that, in a discrimination learning task and i...
Preprint
Full-text available
Resting-state networks are spatially distributed, functionally connected brain regions. Studying these networks gives us information about the large-scale functional organization of the brain and alternations in these networks are considered to play a role in a wide range of neurological conditions and aging. To describe resting-state networks in d...
Article
Full-text available
Although dogs' life expectancies are six to twelve times shorter than that of humans, the demographics (e. g., living conditions) of dogs can still change considerably with aging, similarly to humans. Despite the fact that the dog is a particularly good model for human healthspan, and the number of aged dogs in the population is growing in parallel...
Article
To describe the extent of age-related cognitive decline in dogs, information regarding the baseline occurrence of associated behaviours in the general population is necessary. With a seven-item, data driven Age-Related Changes scale, we evaluated the relationship between sensory functions, training, sex, and the occurrence of behavioural signs asso...
Conference Paper
Resting-state networks (RSNs) are spatially distributed, functionally connected brain regions, characterized by the correlation of the time series of spontaneous, low frequency fluctuations of the blood-oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal. Studying these networks gives us information about the large-scale functional organization of the brain and a...
Conference Paper
Ageing, the process of becoming old, affects every organ. However, adapting to changes in the body is possible as long as the brain remains healthy. Therefore, ageing research needs to focus on healthy brain ageing, or in other words, on successful cognitive ageing. In the Senior Family Dog Project (SFDP) our aim is to explore the cognitive ageing...
Article
Full-text available
Decline in the visuo-spatial memory domain may be an early marker for cognitive decline and has a relevant impact on animal welfare. Current research on visuo-spatial memory in family dogs is often limited byfactors such as the need of extensive pre-training, limited attention to co-occurring medical conditions, a focus on laboratory dogs, or low s...
Chapter
These proceedings contain oral and poster presentations from various experts on animal behaviour and animal welfare in veterinary medicine presented at the conference.

Network

Cited By