Effect of age and severity of cognitive dysfunction on two simple tasks in pet dogs

Abstract Dogs exhibit age-dependent losses in learning and memory as well as a progressive accumulation of neuropathology that parallels that observed in normal human aging and early Alzheimer’s disease. These deficits have been extensively studied using a number of standard cognitive tasks in the laboratory; however, appropriate tools for their assessment in veterinary clinics are still lacking. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of age and the severity of cognitive dysfunction syndrome (CDS) on two simple tests conducted in a clinical setting. A food searching (FS) task and a problem-solving (PS) task were administered to young (1–4 years, n  = 9), middle-aged (5–8 years, n  = 10), cognitively unimpaired aged (⩾9 years, n  = 31), and cognitively impaired aged (⩾9 years, n  = 37) dogs. Cognitive status was classified using an owner-based questionnaire, and in the impaired group, dogs were categorized as having either mild or severe CDS. During the FS task, younger dogs (