Human beings have always tried (and it is becoming more and more common) to improve their communication with their best friend: the dog. Studies of psychology and anthropology, experiments … Many are the steps that have been taken on this path. Stanley Coren is one of the leading figures in this field. He is the author of several books such as The Fabulous Intelligence of Dogs and Do Dogs Dream? (and some more that have not been translated) and besides being a prestigious psychologist, professor of psychology and popularizer, he is a dog trainer.
Coren differentiates in his study various types of canine intelligence in his experiments to measure the IQ of dogs. On the one hand, there is adaptive intelligence, which would be responsible for learning itself and the ability to improvise solutions to problems on its own. On the other hand, instinctive intelligence, which is something specific to each dog and has to do with genetics and the tasks for which it is predisposed (for example, dogs that are descended from hunters and have instincts). These two types of intelligences can be measured by IQ.
However, there is a third type of intelligence that Stanley Coren calls functional intelligence, which also depends on genetics and, to a large extent on race, affects learning of actions, work, what you learn from human beings already obedience and cannot be measured by IQ.
Based on this and the experiments he carried out, Coren established in his book a ranking of the most intelligent canine breeds . At the time controversy was created about it but over time it has been accepted as a fairly successful approximation of the capabilities of the different races. However, now that mongrel dogs are increasingly predominant, the ranking may vary somewhat.
However, several of the beliefs that have always been had are fulfilled, for example about the border collie or the golden retriever. Do you want to know which are the most intelligent breeds? Well, take a look at our gallery.
