First published by Claudia Bensimoun in 2015: World Cynosport Rally & USDAA
How Dog Attention Changes with Age | Claudia Bensimoun 2025
Discover how a dog’s focus evolves from puppy to senior years. Dog expert Claudia Bensimoun explains research from Vetmeduni Vienna on canine cognition and aging.
Have you ever wondered why your puppy can’t seem to sit still, but your senior dog watches the world with calm, steady focus? New research from the Messerli Research Institute at Vetmeduni Vienna reveals that a dog’s attention span isn’t static — it evolves throughout life in ways strikingly similar to humans. Understanding when your dog is most attentive can help you time training sessions, socialization, and mental enrichment for better results.
In this study, Dr. Lisa Wallis, at the Messerli Research Institute, Vetmeduni, Vienna, and her colleagues investigated how dogs focus and concentrate. For dogs to learn successfully, they require a certain level of concentration and attention. Nonetheless, Dr. Willis and colleagues found that the attentiveness of dogs changes throughout a dog’s life, much like that of humans.
Most importantly, in addressing attention changes throughout a dog’s life (when attention peaks and declines in dogs), they concluded that dogs’ attentional and sensorimotor control developmental trajectories are very similar to those found in humans.
The research, published in the Journal Frontiers in Psychology, demonstrated that the attentiveness of all dogs changes throughout their lives, as it does in humans. The study included 145 Border Collies, aged 6 months to 14 years, at the Clever Dog Lab, Vetmeduni Institute, Vienna. Only those dogs that willingly cooperated were involved in these studies. Wallis and her colleagues then determined, for the first time, how attentiveness changes throughout a dog’s entire life using a cross-sectional study design.
Dogs Found Humans More Interesting Than Objects
Wallis wanted to determine how rapidly dogs of various age groups pay attention to objects or humans. In the first test, the dogs were confronted with a child’s toy that was suddenly suspended from the ceiling. Wallis and her colleagues then measured how quickly each dog reacted to this occurrence, and also how rapidly the dogs became accustomed to it. At the beginning of testing, all the dogs responded with similar speed to the stimulus (the child’s toy). But the older dogs lost interest in the toy more quickly than the younger dogs did.
In the second test, a familiar person who was known to the dog being tested entered the room and then pretended to paint the wall. Surprisingly, all the dogs reacted together. The dogs watched the person and the paint roller in the painter’s hand for a much longer time than they did watching the toy hanging from the ceiling.
“So-called ‘social attentiveness‘ was more pronounced in all dogs than ‘non-social’ attentiveness. The dogs generally tended to react by watching the person with the object for longer than they did when watching an object on its own. We found that older dogs, like older humans, demonstrated a certain calmness. They were less affected by new items in the environment and thus showed less interest than younger dogs,” says Wallis on sciencedaily.com.
Selective Attention is Highest in Mid-Adulthood
In another test, Wallis and colleagues explored so-called selective attention. The dogs first had to participate in an alternating attention task. In this test, the dogs were required to perform two tasks consecutively. In the first test, the dogs had to find a food reward that had been thrown on the floor by the experimenter. After the dogs ate the food, the experimenter would then wait for the dog to establish eye contact with her.
These tasks were repeated for 20 trials. Each time there was eye contact, a clicking sound made by a clicker would sound, and the dog was then rewarded with hot dog bits. The researchers then timed how long it took for the dog to find the food and look up at the experimenter’s face.
By comparing both time spans, middle-aged dogs, which were between three and six years old, reacted more rapidly. Within these testing conditions, sensorimotor abilities were found to be the highest among middle-aged dogs.
Younger dogs did not perform as well, most likely due to their limited experience. It was found that motor abilities in dogs, like those in humans, deteriorate with advanced age.
“Humans that show age-related declines in attention and motor coordination exhibit patterns similar to those we observed in dogs,” notes Wallis, “underscoring the parallel developmental and aging trajectories across both species.”
Research Paper Reference
Wallis, L. J., Virányi, Z., Müller, C. A., Serisier, S., Huber, L., & Range, F. (2014). Lifespan Development of Attention in Domestic Dogs. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 71.
Link: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00071/full
Claudia Bensimoun, Dog Behavior Writer, Dog Expert, BarkUpToday Pet Behavior, Dog Attention Span, Canine Lifespan Study, Lifespan Development of Attentiveness in Dogs, Dr Lisa Wallis Research, Vetmeduni Vienna, Clever Dog Lab, Dog Cognitive Aging, Dog Focus by Age, Canine Learning and Aging, Dog Behavior Science, Frontiers in Psychology, Dog Training by Life Stage, Puppy to Senior Dog Attention, Middle Aged Dogs Focus, Senior Dog Cognitive Health, Dog Sensorimotor Control, Canine Cognitive Development, Dog Aging Research, Dog Training Tips 2025, Dog Brain Health, Dog Cognition Study