Okay, in this lecture,
we're gonna talk about the explosion of the study of dog cognition.
We've talked a lot about how dogs communicate
with humans using gestures in particular.
And how we think that might have,
that dogs might actually understand our communicative intentions.
And we've talked about the origin of those abilities and how we think that might have
evolve, these skills might have evolved during domestication.
And, of course, how coming to that realization then allowed us to see
the evolutionary process that drove that potential evolution.
That then allowed us to think about our own species and
our close primate relatives and how their cognition may have evolved.
But now we're gonna change gears, and
now we're gonna really just focus on dog psychology.
And this lecture is all about how dogs have a remarkable
understanding of the social world.
It's not just that they understand our gestures,
dogs are doing even more than that.
And lots of researchers are asking lots of questions,
not just about their social skills but about all of dog cognition.
While in this lecture we're gonna focus on social skills,
the next lecture will look at non-social problem solving in dogs.
So for this lecture, chapter six is gonna be most relevant and helpful.
Many of the examples that we talk about
in this lecture are actually in chapter six as well.
And Dognition, it's gonna be,
the cunning games are gonna be really useful as a laboratory exercise,
because they're very relevant to what we're gonna be talking about.
And reasoning, this is super relevant to what we're gonna be talking, because we're
gonna see where dogs potentially make some inferential reasoning.
Use inferential reasoning, and you can do that with your own dog and
see where your dog stands on some of the same games.
Using some of the same cognition we're gonna talk about in this lecture.
Okay.
So since dogs have been recognized as being remarkable by science,
not as something unremarkable that's just any old regular old mammal.
But instead dogs have a set of social skills that seem to be similar to what we
think are important in human infants.
And that was the result of domestication, potentially.
There's been a whole explosion of research.
People are asking all sorts of questions using a cognitive approach and
an ecological approach to cognition to understand dogs.
And that's really what's new is that people are learning about dogs,
using this cognitive approach which really had not happened before.
And these are the types of questions people are asking.
Do dogs imitate?
Are dogs capable of intentional deception?
Do they know what you know and don't know?
How do they navigate?
Do they take shortcuts?
Do they understand the causal properties of the world?
Do they understand symbols like children do, and do breeds really differ?
We have a sense that they do, but do they really differ cognitively?
So these are the types of questions that people are asking, and
this is the type of work we'll focus on now.
The really exciting part about this is, a lot of the research we're gonna be talking
about from now on is being directly applied to trying to
identify the best service dogs, and the best military dogs.
So that we can increase the supply of these dogs doing these amazing jobs, and
we can have more dogs helping more people.
So the work is not just interesting if you just like dogs and
you understand them better, the work is actually being applied to the real world.
So with Oreo, my childhood dog, we didn't just do the gesture games.
We actually decided to do one more game that really set everything
going in terms of thinking about dog social cognition.
And what we wanted to know is, since Oreo was so good at using gestures, and
reading my gestures or my gaze direction to find hidden food.
Could Oreo at the same time do the same thing for me?
Could Oreo not only comprehend what I was saying but
could Oreo produce some type of information or some kind of signal
to me to let me know where something was hidden that he might want to eat?
So we came up with a really simple game where he could show me where something was
that had been hidden.
So what happened was someone would go and
hide food in one of three baskets- Oreo is there and was watching.
I wasn't there.
And then I would come out and
I wouldn't know which basket the food had been hidden in.
I would watch for 30 seconds or a minute and Oreo could just do nothing, or
Oreo could really actively try to show me.
Use showing behaviors, like barking and looking in the direction where the food
is, or standing closest to where the food is, to show me where the hidden food was.
And what we found was that Oreo was very good at indicating where something was.
It ended up that Daisy, my dog,
my brother's other childhood dog, she actually never indicated anything.
She just sat there and did nothing.
And so this is a great example, where there's a lot of individual variability
and it's important to look at lots of dogs.
And so two dogs isn't enough and while Oreo's behavior was really interesting,.
Luckily lots of people have been looking at this type of behavior and especially
Adam Miklosi in Hungary, has really examined the showing behavior in dogs.
And found lots of interesting evidence that do tend or
they do seem to be communicating intentionally.
And they do pay attention to whether you can see them or not.
