Aging Dogs: Do They Loose Their Abilities?

"Older dogs spent more time than younger dogs to solve all the tasks correctly. In addition, we have shown that older animals, like humans, have a much less flexible thinking than younger individuals, and it is as difficult for them as it is for us to get rid of old habits and facts of life ", - said Lisa Wallace from the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna (Austria). For many years Lisa Wallace and her colleagues have been studying what happens to the intellectual abilities of dogs when they age, investigating a well-spread stereotype of the West, expressed as "you can not teach an old dog new tricks."
To do this, the scientists recruited a group of nearly a hundred dogs of such breed as border collie, famous for its learning capacity and high dog IQ, and their handlers, and invited them to participate in a series of games designed to assess their memory, ability to learn and logical "thinking."

All these games were held on a special machine for dogs, which was a touch screen monitor on which dog could press using the nose. This screen displayed pares of images that a dog had to remember, and then play back or choose waste, unfamiliar image. Contrary to popular thinking, aged dogs still could acquire new skills and memories, although they did it worse than their younger competitors. On the other hand, age made them wiser - they better recalled what they remembered before, and knew how to distinguish those pictures that they have already seen from other unfamiliar images, generally showing a higher level of logical "thinking."
All this, as scientists believe, suggests that dogs can be used for observation of how aging affects memory, and for experiments on improvement of the cognitive abilities in the elderly age.
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