Decoding
Dog Behavior: Brian Hare, an associate professor at Duke University, has
created a new method to research dog behavior, using the Internet and citizen
science.
In 1995,
Brian Hare began to wonder what his dog Oreo was thinking.
At the
time, he was a sophomore at Emory University, where he was studying animal
psychology with Michael Tomasello. Dr. Tomasello was comparing the social
intelligence of humans and other animals.
Humans, it
was known at the time, are exquisitely sensitive to signals from other humans.
We use that information to solve problems that we might struggle to figure out
on our own.
Dr. Tomasello
discovered that chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, typically fail to
notice much of this social information. Pointing to the location of a hidden
banana will usually not help a chimp find the banana, for example. Perhaps the
pointing test revealed something important about how the human mind evolved.
But Mr.
Hare had his doubts. “I think my dog can do that,” he declared.
To persuade
his mentor, he videotaped Oreo chasing after tennis balls. And indeed, when he
pointed left or right, off the dog would run, in the indicated direction, to
find a ball.
He then
followed up with a full-blown experiment, using food hidden under cups in his
garage; Oreo consistently picked out the right cup after Mr. Hare pointed to
it, and other dogs (including some who had never seen Mr. Hare) did well too.
After he
got his doctorate in biological anthropology from Harvard, Dr. Hare and his
colleagues finally published their results: Dogs could indeed pass the pointing
test, while wolves, their wild relatives, could not.
Dr. Hare,
now an associate professor at Duke, has continued to probe the canine mind, but
his research has been constrained by the number of dogs he can study. Now he
hopes to expand his research geometrically — with the help of dog owners around
the world. He is the chief scientific officer of a new company called
Dognition, which produces a Web site where people can test their dog’s
cognition, learn about their pets and, Dr. Hare hopes, supply him and his
colleagues with scientific data on tens of thousands of dogs.
“Because
it’s big data, we can ask questions that nobody could have a chance to look
at,” he said.
From his
previous research, Dr. Hare has argued that dogs evolved their extraordinary
social intelligence once their ancestors began lingering around early human
settlements. As he and his wife, Vanessa Woods, explain in their new book, “The
Genius of Dogs,” natural selection favored the dogs that did a better job of
figuring out the intentions of humans.
While this
evolution gave dogs one cognitive gift, it didn’t make them more intelligent in
general. “If you compare them to wolves as individuals, they look like idiots,”
Dr. Hare said. “But if you then show them having a human solve the problem,
they’re geniuses.”
To explore
dog cognition further, he set up the Duke Canine Cognition Center in 2009. He
and his colleagues built a network of 1,000 dog owners willing to bring in
their pets for tests.
Dr. Hare
began to investigate new questions about dogs with this willing pack of
animals. With a grant from the Office of Naval Research, for example, he is
looking at ways to identify dogs for jobs like bomb detection.
“They spend
two years trying to get these dogs ready to go, and then most programs lose 7
out of 10,” he said. “Maybe they can’t take the commands, or maybe they can’t
take the perspective of the humans.”
He is
trying to find the “cognitive style” of the successful service dogs. To do so,
he and his colleagues have developed a battery of 30 tests that altogether take
four hours to administer. They have tested 200 dogs and are searching for
hallmarks that set the service dogs apart.
He helped
form Dognition, he said, partly because of interest from dog trainers who asked
him if they could test their own dogs’ cognitive style.
The tests
are now available online: For a fee, dog owners get video instructions for how
to carry them out. (Besides the pointing test, they include a test in which the
owner yawns and then watches to see if the dog does too — a potential sign that
dog and owner are strongly bonded.) The company then analyzes how a given dog
compares with others in its database for qualities like empathy and memory.
Not every
expert is convinced, however, that such seemingly objective judgments can be
gleaned from research that is still in its early stages.
“To me,
part of being a dog scientist is acknowledging up front how little we know
about their cognition,” said Alexandra Horowitz, a dog cognition expert at
Barnard College. “I’d like to see a company which tries to strengthen
relationships between dogs and people by getting people excited about the fact
that science has just begun to investigate the dog mind, and our current
understanding is minimal. It would be honest to admit how mysterious this other
mind really is.”
Dr. Hare
agrees that dog owners should not look at the tests as a canine equivalent of
the SATs. “What we’re desperately trying to stay away from is, ‘Your dog is a
99, and your dog is 20, and 99 is better than 20,’ ” he said. “Maybe one
cognitive style is better in one context than another.”
Adam
Miklosi, a dog cognition expert at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest and a
scientific adviser to Dognition, says the tests should not be prescriptive.
“It’s not like a phone number you call to get your washing machine fixed,” he
said. “It’s a fun thing to do.”
Dr. Hare
says his main goal is to build a database that will shed light on longstanding
questions about behavior, breeding and genetics — for example, whether the
cognitive styles of various breeds can be linked to their genes. (Dr. Miklosi
cautions, however, that the data that comes from people playing games with
their dogs in their living room won’t be as carefully controlled as the
experiments scientists run in their labs.)
One
hypothesis has already emerged from Dognition’s users, Dr. Hare said. A
surprising link turned up between empathy in dogs and deception. The dogs that
are most bonded to their owners turn out to be most likely to observe their
owner in order to steal food. “I would not have thought to test for that
relationship at Duke, but with Dognition we can see it,” said Dr. Hare.
As the
science of dog cognition comes into better focus, Dr. Hare hopes that
scientists can use Dognition to deliver their insights to dog trainers.
Science-based dog training would take into account what dogs are good at, what
they’re bad at and the biases that influence their minds.
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