UNL dog lab studies benefits of interaction between dogs and people

Only a few years old, the Canine Cognition and Human Interaction Lab is making discoveries.

LINCOLN, Neb. (KLKN) – Odds are if you’re at the Canine Cognition and Human Interaction Lab, you’re a dog lover, just like director Jeffrey Stevens.

“When I started the lab, I had one dog,” recalls Stevens, “the best dog in the world. Now I have three dogs.”

In a way, though, he’s got a lot more than three, because so many dogs are constantly visiting him in the basement of the 501 building on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln campus.

Stevens explains, “People bring their dogs into campus and our facility here, and we can do behavioral tests, where usually it’s games with treats, and we can find out about their behavior and cognition.”

Why so many? To get well-rounded data, researchers need as many dogs as they can find. Luckily, they’ve got a lot of people interested in donating some of their time (and their dog’s abilities) to the cause.

“We get all kinds of variations”, says Stevens. “Some dogs are great at these tasks, some dogs struggle with the tasks, we get everything in between. There’s just a lot of variation in what we see across dogs, which, to me, is really interesting.”

Perhaps just as interesting as what dogs can do is the other side of the work that deals more with people.

“We’re interested in how dogs influence humans, so how dog/human interactions play out and how that can influence human psychology and well-being,” Stevens explained. “What are some of the benefits associated with owning or interacting with dogs?”

For instance, do dogs help people who are doing mental puzzles compared to people who don’t get playtime with dogs? Conventional wisdom gives one answer, but the results of the studies give another.

“The answer was ‘no’. Interacting with a dog didn’t make people have better attention, or better memory, or anything like that. But we did definitely find improvements in their mood, and their stress levels, and their anxiety levels”, Stevens says.

It’s that kind of work that can really help people’s mental health as we start to uncover just how our relationship with dogs works. You can actually play a role in that work. They’re always looking to expand the database with new dogs. If you’re interested, check out the C-CHIL website at dogcog.unl.edu.