On the (limited) use of touchscreen-based behavioural and cognitive research with dogs: potential causes and future directions

Dogs (*Canis familiaris*) have become a favoured model in cognitive and behavioural studies, yet the field’s methodologies remain primarily manual. We confirmed the field' s rapid and sustained growth, with 1132 behavioural and cognitive papers found between 2019 and 2024 alone. In contrast, only 13 studies employed fully automated touchscreen-based methodologies for the entire indexed record.To investigate and address this gap, we 1) evaluate how manually controlled procedures introduce (or increase) biases that impact reproducibility; 2) outline the advantages of touchscreen-based systems, from precise experimental control and data logging to the integration with multimodal sensors for rich, synchronised datasets; 3) examine the 13 existing dog touchscreen studies’ apparatus’s designs, training schedules, human involvement, and extract common design principles; 4) identify different categories of barriers to touchscreen adoption: (i) technical (ii) practical, (iii) thematic, and (iv) *Umwelt*. Finally, 5) we propose an outlook of actionable routes to overcome these obstacles: open source hardware/software ‘survival guides’, multi lab collaboration for protocol validation, *Umwelt* aligned design, and translational touchscreen-based tasks that directly address more applied questions.By bridging the gap between automation and the practical scientific interests of canine researchers, touchscreen-based methodologies can enhance reproducibility, accelerate discovery, and provide objective behavioural and cognitive indicators, if the community pursues collaborative, open, and dog centred solutions.