Human-Animal interaction researcher here Friday
SUNY Fredonia will welcome Dr. Sandra McCune to campus on Feb. 8. She is currently head of Human-Animal Interaction Research at the WALTHAM® Centre for Pet Nutrition in Leicestershire, England. She will speak in Room 204 of the Williams Center at 2 p.m., giving a presentation titled, “Pet ownership and its impact on health, development and well-being.”
Dr. Sandra McCune, head of Human-Animal Interaction Research at the WALTHAM® Centre for Pet Nutrition, will appear Feb. 8. |
As the Human-Animal Interaction (HAI) Scientific Leader at WALTHAM®, Dr. McCune manages a large portfolio of research projects across many aspects of HAI globally. She is also the scientific lead on the public-private partnership Mars-WALTHAM® has formed with the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, one of the National Institutes of Health in the U.S.
WALTHAM® focuses on the nutrition and well being of dogs, cats, horses, birds and fish, and the benefits of their relationship with humans.
Dr. Nancy Gee, a psychology professor at SUNY Fredonia, is a colleague of Dr. McCune. Both share the research interest of human interaction with animals. Dr. Gee’s research has primarily focused on how dogs affect the cognitive and motor skills of pre-school children.
“My research with children has shown that the presence of a well-trained therapy dog has a number of positive effects on children while they are performing cognitive (e.g., memory or categorization) or motor skills (e.g., running an obstacle course) tasks,” Gee explained. “Preschoolers require fewer instructional prompts, have better memory and make fewer task-related errors. These findings combine to indicate that when a well-trained dog is properly incorporated into these types of tasks, children show improved focus and motivation.”
Gee and McCune plan to explore the possibility of a future collaboration. McCune has been part of varied human-interaction research projects throughout her career. Most recent collaborations have revealed that the presence of a pet at home resulted in lower blood pressure in elderly adults. Other work has shown that an animal-assisted classroom intervention with autistic children and their typically developing peers showed improvements in social functioning, including increases in social approach behaviors, decreases in social withdrawal behaviors, and increases in social skills for all children.
Having earned a Ph.D. from Cambridge University, McCune has worked for WALTHAM® since 1993. Her primary areas of study include cat behavior and welfare. In addition, McCune has studied zoology with an emphasis on physiology at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.
