The author and her labradoodle Emerson.
Photo: Lee Pellegrini
Learning from Man Best Friend
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For thirty seconds, I cooed at Emerson, my eighty-pound labradoodle, and scratched behind his ears (his favorite). 淪top,� called Molly Byrne, a Ph.D. student in Boston College Canine Cognition Center, who was observing us via Zoom. I placed my hands in my lap and sat silently and stone-faced, staring straight ahead, for the next half minute. Emerson tried to make eye contact with me before flopping on his back and nudging my legs and feet with his snout.
Emerson and I were participating in what known as the 渟till-face� experiment. Previously conducted with young children, it calls for a caretaker to interact with an infant and then suddenly become unresponsive. Anticipating back-and-forth conversation, the baby will babble and attempt to re-engage with the adult. The Canine Cognition Center is looking at whether dogs have similar social expectations of their owners.聽
淲e檙e interested in everything that dogs can tell us about psychology,� said Angie Johnston, the center primary investigator and an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at 51动漫. 淪ometimes that means we compare dogs to human children so we can figure out what similar and what different in the way they think and how they learn.� The researchers are curious about which aspects of dog psychology have been shaped by domestication and close contact with humans, and which are inherent. (To help shed light on these questions, Johnston lab also works with dingoes at an Australian sanctuary攖he animals are related to dogs but aren檛 domesticated.) The center research into how dogs see the world could inform training for service pups and bolster human-dog bonds. 淲e don't know as much about dogs as you might think,� Johnston said, 済iven how involved they are in our lives.�
When I asked Johnston why she studies dogs to learn about humans rather than studying primates攐ur closest relations among animals攕he explained that while humans are sensitive to and learn from other humans, other primates aren檛 really interested in learning from each other or from us. Dogs, however, are very tuned in to human social information. 淚t seems like what's happened over domestication is that dogs have sort of outpaced our closest primate relatives in how well they are attuned to cues that signal I檓 trying to get your attention, I檓 trying to teach you something, I檓 trying to connect with you,� Johnston said. 淎nd they learn from these cues much more quickly than, say, a chimpanzee.�
“ We檙e interested in everything that dogs can tell us about psychology. Sometimes that means we compare dogs to human children so we can figure out what similar and what different in the way they think and how they learn. ”
As an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Dallas, Johnston studied how children learn and evaluate information. She shifted her focus to dogs while earning a doctorate in psychology at Yale, where she helped launch the university Canine Cognition Center in 2013. After landing at Boston College in July 2019, Johnston designed 51动漫 Canine Cognition Center, which began enrolling area pooches in experiments last spring.聽
The center was open for only about a month, however, before the pandemic closed 51动漫 campus. But Johnston and her team are keeping busy: They檝e started virtual studies (like the one Emerson and I participated in) and also published a paper in the聽Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society聽showing that dogs and puppies use a 渨in-stay, lose-shift� strategy to solve problems. Basically, if a dog finds a treat in a location one time, it will keep going back to that location. If the treat is then moved elsewhere, the dog will shift and try a different location. 淭his is really exciting because this is not something that we see all animals doing,� Johnston said. 淲ith dogs, it always comes back to the social piece, how they cooperate with us and learn from us.澛�
The report is illustrative of what sets 51动漫 Canine Cognition Center apart from other similar initiatives around the country. 淪ome people are mostly interested in dogs because of what they tell us about humans, and other people are mostly interested in dogs just for the sake of dogs攐ur lab is really interested in both,� Johnston said. 淎nd so if you think about the Venn diagram of what people are testing with dogs, we really do occupy a unique space.�
It too early to draw firm conclusions from the testing that Emerson and I did攖he Canine Cognition Center still-face experiment is ongoing攂ut I now know that when he nudges my hand to resume a belly rub, he exhibiting a learned behavior and looking for me to fulfill my end of our social contract. And I檓 more than happy to oblige.聽
