Training level and personality affect border collies’ success in a simple olfactory task
A research team from the Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, examined the olfactory performance of 101 border collies. This study, published in Applied Animal Behaviour Science, aimed to test whether the dog’s personality, inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity, training level, age, and the owner’s rewarding style influence dogs’ olfactory performance without the confounding effect of breed.
To assess olfactory performance, they used the Natural Detection Task (NDT), a simple search task developed by the team and already successfully applied even in the case of wolves. The dogs had to find a hidden dog treat in a line of pots. No training was necessary, as the test leveraged the dogs' natural motivation for food. The task featured three difficulty levels; the first level acted as a pre-test to ensure the dogs understood the task, were motivated, and did not rely on alternative problem-solving methods. Dogs successfully completing the third level were considered to be the best.
During the test, an experimenter – unaware of the location of the hidden food – was observing whether the dog spontaneously indicated a pot (e.g., licking the pot, placing the paw on the pot, poking or pushing the pot with the nose).
„Border collies performed better, if they had higher Responsiveness to training and lower Activity/Excitability personality scores. Interestingly, any kind of training improved olfactory performance in the NDT, however dogs with special olfactory training (e.g., mantrailing, scent work) were not superior.” – said Attila Salamon from the ELTE NAP Canine Brain Research Group, first author of the paper. Senior dogs (8 years or older) performed worse than 0.5-1 years old puppies, but there was no difference between the other age groups. Inattention, hyperactivity, impulsivity and the owner’s rewarding style did not affect border collies’ olfactory performance in the NDT.
"Our study highlights that dogs’ better olfactory performance in the NDT can be linked to their at least basic general training level and some personality traits. Although our findings on border collies cannot be directly generalised to all family dogs, the use of a large single-breed sample allowed us to more accurately assess the influence of some confounding factors on family dogs’ olfactory performance in a simple, standard test situation without being masked by breed effects.” – concluded Márta Gácsi, lead researcher.
Original study: Salamon, A., Lakatos, B., Miklósi, Á., Csibra, B., Kubinyi, E., Andics, A. and Gácsi, M., 2025. Training level and personality affect border collies’ olfactory performance in the Natural Detection Task. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 286, p.106625. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168159125001236
Funding: The study was supported by supported by the National Brain Programme 3.0 (NAP2022-I-3/2022). KE was also supported by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences via a grant to the MTA-ELTE ‘Lendület/Momentum’ Companion Animal Research Group (Grant No. PH1404/21). PR work was funded by NKFIH MEC_N 149124.