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Dog Training In Psychology

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The dog is a faithful and loving friend of man. They are loyal, affectionate, intelligent, and are known to be helpful for one’s mental and physical health. A dog's sense of smell is said to be a thousand times more sensitive than that of humans. Their noses have the ability to hone in on a characteristic pattern of smells associated with certain types of cancers better than any current technology commonly referred to as ‘electronic noses’. By looking at the pattern of smells in samples, dogs can correctly identify them as cancerous and can be applicable for a non-invasive cancer screening.

Dog training
Training a dog to detect the presence of chemical markers of cancers is no simple task. In one study, six dogs of varying breeds and ages “completed a seven month period of training. All were familiar with obedience commands, but none had been previously trained for search or scent discrimination tasks” (Willis et al. 2004). In another study, one dog was “trained twice a week for 12 months” (Horvath et al. 2008). The training is designed as a selection model, resembling that of sniffer dogs, and follows a reward-based approach. There are two objectives in the training method: recognizing the odor signature and learning odor discrimination. Horvarth et al. (2008) trained their dog by requesting the dog to “sniff …show more content…

The exhaled breath of patients represent the ideal specimen for future lung cancer screening; however, sensor arrays and pattern recognition technologies, commonly referred to as electronic noses, “did not bring forward a clinically applicable device” as they “remain incalculable due to their inability to identify a clear target” (Boedeker et al., 2012 and Ehmann et al., 2012). With respect to this, researchers proposed a new approach by applying trained sniffer dogs to test the unknown volatile organic compound

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