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.