So this lecture is about exploding dog cognition further, but looking at how dogs actually understand the physical world. Properties of the world like connectivity, gravity, solidity, and even what they understand about themselves. These are all questions that people have started to ask about dog psychology. But first, I think what will be helpful from The Genius of Dogs is Chapter 7, where we discuss a lot of the studies and more, that I'll discuss here. And I think the most interesting game to play for a lab would be the physical reasoning games. There's some games that, through Dognition, where you can test, does your dog have an understanding of solidity? Meaning, can objects pass through one another. And we know that dogs can solve that type of problem. But the question is, can your dog? So it's not required, but if you thinks it's fun to go find out about your dog, that might be a fun game to play, to better experience what it is we're gonna be talking about today. Okay, so let me show you a video. And I think this video really highlights that while dogs can solve social problems, particularly when it comes to communicating with humans, that great apes don't solve. I think really obviously, there are some things that dogs can't do that great apes can. So this is a great example of something that's actually quite elementary for a great ape, which is to use a tool, a stone in this case, to crack open a nut. That the ape, in this case, the name of the bonobo here is Gnocchi, a bobobo just smashes that nut open with a rock, and now she can eat it. Now, has anybody ever seen a dog do that? [LAUGH] I don't think any time soon we're gonna see a dog that spontaneously learned to open different types of toys using a tool. And in fact, great apes have even been shown to manufacture tools, and have all sort of interesting tool use behavior. So that suggests that dogs, while they are very sophisticated socially, in terms of interacting with us, when it comes to physical reasoning they may not be that remarkable. So that's what we'll talk about today is some specific examples where dogs may not be so special when it comes to understanding the physical world. So here's another example, testing the understanding of gravity in great apes. What you'll see in the video, and this is work by a good friend, Daniel Hanus, and Josep Call, both of them, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Germany. And what they posed to Patrick the chimpanzee is, can you use, can you infer where the food is using your knowledge of gravity? And I think you'll see how this works. And you will make the inference quite quickly as well. They're gonna just hide food in one of those two containers. And Patrick, who can't see where the food is hidden, is gonna have to infer where it is. Thinking about gravity. So a piece of food is shown to Patrick. He's pretty excited, but he doesn't know where it's hidden. So he very quickly gets excited because he knows where it is. Cuz he knows that, of course, gravity pulls objects down, and he knows where the banana is. Very similar work has been done with dogs, where dogs were given a slightly different problem, and in fact, it may be slightly harder. Where food treats were dropped through a tube and when the problem was originally introduced to the dogs, the tube just went directly down into a cup below. There's actually three doors there that the dog can push to open to choose where the food is. And in the beginning, you drop food, the human would drop food, and it would go through the tube, and it would go directly below to the cup below. But then the trick was, if they really understand gravity, and they understand solidity, that they would know that if the tube then was moved to another cup, and this would be elementary for you and I, or another great ape. That they would know to follow the tube, because obviously the tube is solid, and the food is travelling through the tube. But what they did over and over, and over again was, they always chose the location underneath the person's hand. And it seemed to suggest that dogs do not understand gravity the way that great apes and kids do. So another species that's really shown an interesting ability to understand a causal property of the world are ravens. You don't often think of birds as being supreme, intelligent beings, but if you take an ecological approach, and you remember there's different types of intelligence, and then you can potentially recognize these things. That a species like a raven is actually brilliant in many ways, and that's what Bernd Heinrich, who was one of the, sort of, pioneers in studying corvid or the family birds that ravens belong to. Corvid cognition, corvid's are sort of the apes of the bird world and lot's of people are studying corvid cognition, and as excited about corvids as people become about dogs. And ravens as one example, really seemed to show an interesting understanding of connectivity. Bernd Heinrich did very simple experiment where he would hang food on strings below tree branches, the ravens were on the tree branches, and they could just simply pull a string to pull the food up. The trick was they had to figure out which string to pull. And in the beginning they had strings that had no food connected to them, versus a string that did, very simple problems. And the ravens, of course, without any mistakes, pulled the string that has food, but even more interesting is what happened when he crossed strings. So there you had to actually perceive and understand that the string that was closest to the food was actually not the string that you needed to pull, that you needed to pull the string that was actually connected. And they performed marvelously and understood problems like that, and even more complicated problems, that show very clearly they know that when two objects are connected, that they act together. And they can use that to solve a lot of problems flexibly, because they understand the cause of the change in the environment caused by connectivity.
