Do Puppies Expect Good News? What a 60-Day Study Found
Table of contents
A puppy can learn that one place predicts food and another does not. But what happens when the bowl appears somewhere in between? A 2026 study used that simple question to examine judgment-bias responses in puppies at 60 days of age.
The study found an orderly group pattern: puppies approached a food-linked location fastest, an unrewarded location slowest, and an ambiguous midpoint in between. That is useful evidence that the task can be run with very young dogs. It is not evidence that one puppy is permanently optimistic, pessimistic, anxious, or easy to assess at home.
The question behind the task
Judgment-bias tasks ask whether an ambiguous cue receives a response closer to a previously positive cue or a previously negative cue. In this study, the cue was spatial. The researchers did not try to change the puppies' mood, and they did not treat the midpoint response as a direct window into emotion.
The research question was narrower: after puppies learned that one bowl position predicted food and another did not, would they approach a never-rewarded midpoint at an intermediate speed? That distinction matters because a controlled group response can support a method without telling us what any one puppy feels.
Who took part
The researchers enrolled 82 domestic dog puppies from 17 litters, representing 10 breeds at seven breeding facilities in Italy. The puppies were tested at 60 days of age, while they were still with their dam and littermates and before adoption. Two enrolled puppies did not provide valid observations, leaving 80 puppies in the analysis.
Data collection took place from February through May in 2025 and 2026. This was a varied facility sample, not a representative estimate for every breed, household, or puppy. Breed, body size, litter background, and facility were not cleanly separable in the design.
How the three-position test worked
Each puppy first had a 10-minute habituation period in a quiet area at its facility. The apparatus used three possible locations along an arc about 3 meters from the release point:
- Positive location (P): the bowl position paired with food during learning.
- Negative location (N): the bowl position presented without food.
- Ambiguous location (A): a midpoint between P and N, about 1.5 meters from each, that had not been paired with food.
During discrimination training, the positive and negative locations were presented in a random sequence. A puppy moved on to testing after reaching a learning criterion of three consecutive correct positive and negative pairs, with a maximum of 25 presentations. The median number of training presentations was 15.
The primary test followed a fixed P-N-A sequence and allowed up to three trials. The ambiguous bowl was not rewarded. The puppy's approach time was measured with a stopwatch and checked against video. Each presentation ended at arrival or after 30 seconds. If a puppy did not arrive within that window, the observation was treated as right-censored rather than as an exact 30-second response.
What the researchers measured
The main analysis used 476 presentations from the first two trials: 240 in Trial 1 and 236 in Trial 2. It modeled time to approach with a mixed-effects Cox proportional hazards model and included puppy and litter-level random effects. A second model examined whether the puppy reached the bowl within 30 seconds.
| Location | Presentations | Reached within 30 seconds | Median approach time | Timeouts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Positive (P) | 159 | 159 (100%) | 2.54 seconds | 0% |
| Ambiguous (A) | 158 | 134 (84.8%) | 3.86 seconds | 15.2% |
| Negative (N) | 159 | 98 (61.6%) | 13.25 seconds | 38.4% |
The reported median times were 2.54 seconds for P, 3.86 seconds for A, and 13.25 seconds for N. The middle response was therefore between the learned positive and negative responses in this particular task. A timeout is a missing arrival within the observation window, not proof of fear, sadness, unwillingness, or a lasting temperament trait.
What the results show
1. The group pattern was graded, not all-or-nothing
Location had a clear overall effect in the primary model. Compared with P, the reported hazard ratio was 0.319 for A and 0.114 for N. Comparing N with A, the reported hazard ratio was 0.357. In this analysis, the negative location produced the slowest approach pattern, while the ambiguous location sat between the two learned locations. The pairwise comparisons were reported as below 0.001 after adjustment.
The strongest interpretation is methodological. The three locations produced distinguishable group responses, so the task was sensitive enough to separate them in this sample. A hazard ratio is not a probability that a puppy is optimistic or pessimistic.
2. The midpoint was an experimental cue, not a home assessment
The ambiguous position was created by the researchers and appeared in a carefully controlled sequence. A puppy at home does not face the same release point, bowl placement, learning history, or 30-second observation window. The study therefore cannot turn one approach time into an assessment of a puppy's feelings, future behavior, adoption fit, or training needs.
3. Non-arrivals and repeated observations change the interpretation
The study kept non-arrivals as censored observations instead of discarding them or assigning every timeout the same exact latency. That is a careful choice because a puppy that does not reach the bowl within 30 seconds contributes different information from a puppy that arrives at 30 seconds.
The paper also accounted for repeated observations and shared litter background. The primary analysis did not find a clear effect of trial number (p = 0.076) or sex (p = 0.483). Those results do not prove that repetition or sex never matters. They describe what this sample and this design could detect.
4. The third trial was exploratory
Some puppies completed a third trial, but that group was not selected at random and the paper treated the analysis as exploratory. Responses were slower after repetition, which raises a useful design question: repeated exposure may change the task itself. It does not establish that puppies became less optimistic.
What this study cannot tell us
- It does not diagnose emotion, anxiety, fear, depression, or any clinical condition.
- It does not show that a puppy has a stable optimistic or pessimistic personality.
- It does not predict behavior after adoption or rank puppies for a household.
- It does not establish that the task means the same thing across breeds, facilities, ages, or living environments.
- It does not replace observation of movement, motivation, exploration, recent experience, or everyday behavior.
The authors also noted important limits: only one ambiguous location was used, the P-N-A order was fixed, the first experimenter was not blinded, facility conditions varied, and motivation and locomotor factors were not independently quantified. The study was cross-sectional, so it did not test whether the response stayed stable after adoption.
A careful takeaway
This study gives a useful Methods Note for canine cognition: a spatial judgment-bias task produced an ordered group pattern in 60-day-old puppies. The positive, ambiguous, and negative locations were not interchangeable, and the analysis preserved information from puppies that did not arrive within the time limit.
The result is best used as a reminder to separate a measured task response from a broad story about an individual animal. An intermediate approach in a controlled experiment is not a home temperament test. For everyday care, the responsible lesson is to look at the whole context and repeated behavior rather than assigning a label from one moment.
Source and study limits
This article summarizes one peer-reviewed study: Gazzano and colleagues, "Judgment Bias Responses in Domestic Dog Puppies at 60 Days of Age," published in Veterinary Sciences in 2026. Read the PubMed record, the full text in PubMed Central, and the publisher record and DOI for the complete methods, analysis, ethics statement, and limitations.
Reported figures and methods above come from that study. The practical interpretation is intentionally narrower than the study title: it explains what the task measured in this sample and what remains unresolved about individual puppies.
