Sleep-spindles as a marker of attention and intelligence in dogs

The sleep spindle-generating thalamo-cortical circuitry supports attention capacity in awake humans and animals, but using sleep spindles to predict differences in attention has not been tried in either. Of the more commonly examined cognitive correlates of spindle occurrence and amplitude, post-sleep recall, and general intelligence, only post-sleep recall had been studied in dogs, rats and mice. Here, we examined a sample of companion dogs (N = 58) for whom polysomnographic recordings and several cognitive tests were performed on two occasions each, with a three-month break in-between. Five of the tests were used to extract a factor analogous to human g (general mental ability). A sixth test in the battery measured sustained attention. Both attention and g-factor scores were linked to higher slow spindle occurrence and absolute sigma power detected in polysomnographic recordings over the central electrode. These effects persisted across measurement occasions. Higher intrinsic spindle frequency was, in turn, linked to lower g-factor scores but displayed no relationship with attention scores. The overlap in localization and direction for the effects of slow spindle density (spindles/minute) and sigma power supports that they tap into the same underlying cognition-relevant aspects of spindling. Given earlier large sample and meta-analysis validations of sigma power as a reliable predictor of cognitive performance in humans, we thus conclude that the currently handled method for quantifying spindle density in dogs indeed measures cognition-relevant spindle activity by virtue of its agreement with the sigma power alternative.