Ivaylo Iotchev

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Researcher at Eötvös Loránd University

Although a positive link between sleep spindle occurrence and measures of post-sleep recall (learning success) is often reported for humans and replicated across species, the test-retest reliability of the effect is sometimes questioned. The largest to date study could not confirm the association, however methods for automatic spindle detection div...

Sleep spindles are phasic events observed in mammalian non-rapid eye movement sleep. They are relevant today in the study of memory consolidation, sleep quality, mental health and ageing. We argue that our advanced understanding of their mechanisms has not exhausted the utility and need for animal model work. This is both because some topics, like...

In psychology and neuroscience, opposition to free will has asserted that any degree of perceived self-control or choice is a mere epiphenomenon which provides no meaningful influence on action. The present research tested the validity of this conclusion by designing a paradigm in which the potential effect of self-monitoring on motor output could...

Dogs interpret cues as being about location, which human infants would relate to objects. This spatial bias could shed light on the evolution of object-centered thought, however, research needs to rule out that this is not a by-product of dogs' weaker (compared to humans) visual capacities. In this study, we used a data set in which dogs were teste...

Background There are many automated spike-wave discharge detectors, but the known weaknesses of otherwise good methods and the varying working conditions of different research groups (mainly the access to hardware and software) invite further exploration into alternative approaches. New method The algorithm combines two criteria, one in the time-do...

The role of sleep in memory consolidation is a widely discussed but still debated area of research. In light of the fact that memory consolidation during sleep is an evolutionary adaptive function, investigating the same phenomenon in nonhuman model species is highly relevant for its understanding. One such species, which has acquired human-analog...

Simple Summary Choosing the right dog that fits well with an owner’s lifestyle is important for the happiness of both the dog and the owner. This study looked into why and how people in Austria choose their dogs by surveying over a thousand dog owners. Unlike past studies, we asked open-ended questions so that the owners could freely share their re...

Neuroscientific support for the equivalence hypothesis, stating that perception can be either conscious or unconscious, rests upon overlap in the brain areas activated during conscious perception and subliminal priming. This interpretation is argued here incompatible with the implications of the biased competition model, wherein different interpret...

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...

Since many dog adoptions end with the dog being abandoned due to unmet expectations, it is important to know how certain demographic variables and previous experiences of the owners relate to the characteristics of the dog they are looking for. We asked Austrian dog owners about why they chose their dog in an online questionnaire. Based on their fr...

The shape of the cranium is one of the most notable physical changes induced in domestic dogs through selective breeding and is measured using the cephalic index (CI). High CI (a ratio of skull width to skull length > 60) is characterized by a short muzzle and flat face and is referred to as brachycephaly. Brachycephalic dogs display some potential...

Since the dawn of comparative cognitive research, dogs were suspected to possess some capacity for responding to human spoken language. Neuroimaging studies have supported the existence of relevant mechanisms, but convincing behavioral performance is rare, with only few exceptional dogs worldwide demonstrating a lexicon of object-labels they respon...

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...

A response to the proposition of Brooks and Yamamoto for how to conceptualize/approach tool use in dogs.

Inspired by work on infants, we investigated whether dogs’ behaviors are guided by human displays of preference, contrasting with the animals’ own choices. In a rewarded fetching task, dogs override their own interest toward “disgusting” objects and retrieve what the owner prefers. However, in previous research, both objects were inherently neutral...

Simple Summary Cognitive aging in dogs has attracted interest due to their utility as an animal model for human aging and their need for veterinary care. The latter in particular would benefit substantially from standardized tests for fast and comfortable administration, which would reduce time and financial costs for both owners and practitioners....

Simple Summary Sleep alterations are known to be severe accompanying symptoms of many human psychiatric conditions, and validated clinical protocols are in place for their diagnosis and treatment. However, sleep monitoring is not yet part of standard veterinary practice, and the possible importance of sleep-related physiological alterations for cer...

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...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0227253.].

Social dominance is an important and widely used concept, however, different interpretations have led to ambiguity in the scientific literature and in popular science. Even though in ethology dominance is an attribute of dyadic encounters, and not a characteristic of the individual, ‘dominance’ has often been referred to as a personality trait in a...

Introduction: The aim of this study was to explore spontaneous social interactions between dyads of unfamiliar adult dogs. Although intraspecific encounters are frequent events in the life of pet dogs, the factors that might influence encounters, such as sex, dyad composition, reproductive status, age, and state of cohabitation (keeping the dogs s...

Non-REM bursts of activity in the sigma range (9–16 Hz) typical of sleep spindles predict learning in dogs, similar to humans and rats. Little is known, however, about the age-related changes in amplitude, density (spindles/minute) and frequency (waves/second) of canine spindles. We investigated a large sample (N = 155) of intact and neutered pet d...

Chapman & Huffman's moral analysis fails to prove that the exploitation of animals or the environment is causally connected to beliefs about human capacities. Their exposition of the philosophical interpretations of animal cognition ignores historical context and confounds different levels of analysis. Their analysis of the scientific literature, f...

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...

The gaze of other dogs and humans is informative for dogs, but it has not been explored which factors predict face-directed attention. We used image presentations of unfamiliar human and dog heads, facing the observer (portrait) or facing away (profile), and measured looking time responses. We expected dog portraits to be aversive, human portraits...

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has not been fixed in the paper.

Sleep spindles are phasic bursts of thalamo-cortical activity, visible in the cortex as transient oscillations in the sigma range (usually defined in humans as 12–14 or 9–16 Hz). They have been associated with sleep-dependent memory consolidation and sleep stability in humans and rodents. Occurrence, frequency, amplitude and duration of sleep spind...

These proceedings contain oral and poster presentations from various experts on animal behaviour and animal welfare in veterinary medicine presented at the conference.

These proceedings contain oral and poster presentations from various experts on animal behaviour and animal welfare in veterinary medicine presented at the conference.

Descriptions of demonic possession taken at face value could be easily mistaken as arguments for mind-body dualism. Opposition to the idea of non-material minds does not, however, beg the assumption that every mind has its own body. We propose a scientific theory of ‘possession’ to explain how a single brain can serve as the ‘hardware’ to several ‘...