Students or interns needed

Can dogs mentally represent objects that are not actually there? The ability to imagine hypothetical situations underpins many complex cognitive skills and was long thought to be unique to humans. A recent study showed that a language-trained bonobo could track "pretend" objects during playful interactions with a human. In this new study, we will test whether family dogs have the same ability by observing how they respond when an experimenter pretends to hide and move an imaginary reward. We are looking for 1-2 highly motivated students or interns to join our team. Students will be guided on how to carry out behavioural tests with dogs, recognise canine stress signals, and evaluate dog behaviour. This project can serve as a master's or diploma thesis. It will require around 10 hours per week of data collection, starting anytime soon and continuing until data collection is completed. Ideally, the project would end within 3/4 months. This project will be supervised by Christoph Völter, PhD. For more details, please contact Andrea Sommese, PhD: andrea.sommese@vetmeduni.ac.at

Abschlussarbeiten im Clever Dog Lab!

Bewerbungen bei Lucrezia Lonardo (lucrezia.lonardo@vetmeduni.ac.at), bei ihr gibt es auch Info über die Projekte.

Internship in animal cognition, Vienna (Austria).  We currently offer to motivated and outstanding students the opportunity to carry out a research internship in the field of animal social cognition, emotion and behaviour. Internships can be carried out in fulfilment of your academic curriculum or they can be finalised to the writing of a thesis. The minimum time availability required to collect data with us is at least 4 months (full-time). You will be working under the supervision of Dr. Lucrezia Lonardo (postdoc) and Prof. Ludwig Huber, helping to test pet dogs in behavioural studies. If you are required to write a thesis for your university, please specify this in your application as this will affect the timeline of your internship. You will be offered statistical support as soon as all the data have been collected as well as continuous supervision and writing support. Students are encouraged to present their study proposal or their results in our Comparative Cognition seminar. To apply, please fill in the questionnaire (see QR code or directly at https://s.surveyplanet.com/llhm9yc3) and send any additional (optional) information, such as the flexibility of your start date, your letter of motivation your transcript of record and cv to lucrezia.lonardo@vetmeduni.ac.at".