Does Your Dog Understand You?
Strong selective pressure has made Fido seem
smarter | By Clive Wynne
Clive Wynne
According to Men's Health magazine, 71% of American men believe their dogs
understand them at some telepathic level.1The Tonight Show's host, Jay Leno,
suggested that this was because men and dogs share the same basic interests
("eat, sleep, play ball, and hump"). Recent research suggests psychological
similarities between human and dog that might surprise even a comedian.
For years researchers have been looking to chimpanzees to find glimpses of
human-like intelligence. The argument, reasonable enough on its face, was that
genetic relatedness would predict psychological similarity. But what about Fido?
When stacked up against man's closest relatives, man's best friends perform
remarkably well in tasks that gauge a comprehension of human commands and
cues. A knack for vocabulary and an intense attentiveness to human action are
the kinds of behaviors that look intelligent to people. But this is because they
were selected, first naturally and later artificially, to be adapted to their niche,
human society. Further studies will shed more light on how dogs fake human
intelligence.
DOGS GET THE POINT Dogs outperform chimpanzees on several tests that
require understanding someone else's point of view – what psychologists call
"theory of mind" abilities. Here is a simple and compelling test that any dog
owner can easily reproduce. Hide a piece of food in one of two opaque
containers. The dog is not permitted to see where the food has been hidden but
instead must find the food by following a communicative gesture, such as
pointing, by the experimenter.
Brian Hare and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, found that dogs, even puppies brought up at
a kennel with minimal human contact, were fully competent at this task. On the
other hand, of nine chimpanzees tested, only two showed any success. Wolves
performed above chance, but not as well as the dogs.2
Viktoria Szetei and colleagues at Eötvös Loránd University and the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences in Budapest, found that dogs will follow human gestures
even over the evidence of their own senses. Although the researchers used
strong-smelling Hungarian salami, the dogs still went to an empty container if the
experimenter pointed to it.3
Dogs also appear to understand what people are thinking far more effectively
than do chimpanzees. Daniel Povinelli and colleagues at the New Iberia research
center in Louisiana gave chimpanzees the choice between begging for food from
somebody who could see them, and someone who could not. Surprisingly,
chimps showed little understanding that there was no point in begging for food
from somebody with a bucket over her head.4 Zsófia Virányi and colleagues
replicated this simple test on some Budapest dogs. The dogs were confronted by
two unfamiliar women, each holding a liver sandwich. One person faced the dog
while the other looked away. Unlike the chimpanzees in Louisiana, Budapest
dogs spontaneously begged from only the person who was looking at them. 5
Dogs can also use their own gazes to direct a person's attention. Ádám Miklósi
and colleagues in Budapest hid a dog's favored toy or piece of food in one of
three locations in the absence of the dog's owner. When the owners returned,
Miklósi found that the restrained dogs literally showed their owners where the
desired object had been hidden, by first barking to get their attention and then
looking back and forth between the object's location and the owners.6 In every
case the owner was able to locate the food or toy based solely on the dog's
communicative glances.
TALK TO ME, RICO Most dog owners notice that their pets understand at least a
few words. Darwin's neighbor at Down, Sir John Lubbock (a banker and keen
contributor to several branches of science), was one of the first to test how much
human language dogs understand. Lubbock placed cards with different words on
them in front of his poodle, Van. Whatever Van selected he received. Lubbock
was greatly impressed by the frequency with which Van brought the card with the
word "food" written on it.7
There is, however, no need to suppose Van was communicating his thoughts to
Lubbock. It is far more parsimonious to assume that the dog's actions were a
product of the law of effect: Behaviors that produce desired consequences will be
repeated.
A far more compelling study of language comprehension in dogs appeared this
past summer. Juliane Kaminski and colleagues in Leipzig found a border collie,
Rico, who knew the names of over 200 objects. Rico could be ordered into a
room to collect a named item from among nine other items with which he was
also familiar. Rico must have been responding based just on the name of the
item, because owner and experimenter remained in one room while the dog went
into the other to make his selection.8 More remarkable than just his vocabulary
was Rico's ability to learn new words through a process known as fast mapping.
The experimenters used a word that was not familiar to Rico and sent him into a
room that contained eight items. Seven of these objects were familiar but he did
not know the name of the eighth. In seven out of ten tests with novel words Rico
appropriately retrieved a different novel item each time. As Kaminski and
colleagues conclude, "Apparently he was able to link the novel word to the novel
item based on exclusion learning."
Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once remarked, "However eloquently
[your dog] may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were honest though
poor."9 So, we should be careful to keep Rico's achievements in perspective. For
one thing, Rico forgot half of his newly learned words within four weeks. Also, we
should be wary of concluding that because dogs can respond to words as
commands to fetch objects that they have any understanding of grammar or
syntax. No one yet has presented evidence that a dog can distinguish the
difference between "man bites dog" and "dog bites man."
THE TAIL MAY WAG The effort to find aspects of human intelligence in
chimpanzees was motivated by the recognition that chimps and people are
closely related. An estimated five million years of evolution separates people and
our closest great-ape relatives. But for all that genetic proximity, chimps have
spent rather little time interacting with us. Dogs may not be kin, but they have
been kith for more than 10,000 years. A burial site in Israel from 12,000 years
ago contains the bodies of an old woman with her puppy.10 DNA evidence
suggests the association may go back as far as 100,000 years.11
Whatever date is finally agreed upon for the start of dog-human association, it is
clear that human society has been the dog niche for a very long time. Figuring
out what these odd, hairless apes were up to has been a major selection
pressure on domestic dogs: First through natural selection, dogs that scrounged
around human camps had more offspring than those that fended for themselves;
later through artificial selection, people selectively bred the traits they wanted to
see in companion animals. Such an evolutionary account of dog smarts gains
support from evidence that wolves do not share dogs' successes in
communicating with people.
In Sweden, Kenth Svartberg and Björn Forkman tested more than 15,000 dogs
from 164 different breeds to uncover the species' fundamental personality traits.
Five basic dimensions of canine character emerged. Four of these five are
similar to well-established dimensions of human personality: playfulness,
curiosity, sociability, and aggressiveness.12 Only chase proneness seems outside
the human realm of experience. Jay Leno might be surprised at how close to the
mark he was: Dogs really do have a lot in common with people. Finding the limits
of that similarity promises to be a rich research seam for some time to come.
Clive Wynne, is an associate professor in psychology at the University of Florida,
and studies animal behavior in species ranging from pigeons to marsupials. His
latest book is Do Animals Think? published by Princeton University Press.
References
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