Does Your Dog Understand You?

Strong selective pressure has made Fido seem smarter

By Clive Wynne
According to Men's Health magazine, 71% of American men believe their dogs understand them at
some telepathic level.
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The Tonight Show's host, Jay Leno, suggested that this as because men and dogs
share the same basic interests !"eat, sleep, play ball, and hump"#. $ecent research suggests psychological
similarities beteen human and dog that might surprise even a comedian.
%or years researchers have been loo&ing to chimpanzees to find glimpses of human'li&e intelligence.
(he argument, reasonable enough on its face, as that genetic relatedness ould predict psychological
similarity. )ut hat about %ido*
+hen stac&ed up against man's closest relatives, man's best friends perform remar&ably ell in tas&s
that gauge a comprehension of human commands and cues. A &nac& for vocabulary and an intense
attentiveness to human action are the &inds of behaviors that loo& intelligent to people. )ut this is because
they ere selected, first naturally and later artificially, to be adapted to their niche, human society. %urther
studies ill shed more light on ho dogs fa&e human intelligence.
DOGS GE !E "O#$ ,ogs outperform chimpanzees on several tests that re-uire understanding
someone else's point of vie . hat psychologists call "theory of mind" abilities. /ere is a simple and
compelling test that any dog oner can easily reproduce. /ide a piece of food in one of to opa-ue
containers. (he dog is not permitted to see here the food has been hidden but instead must find the food by
folloing a communicative gesture, such as pointing, by the e0perimenter.
)rian /are and colleagues at the 1a0 2lanc& 3nstitute for 4volutionary Anthropology in Leipzig,
5ermany, found that dogs, even puppies brought up at a &ennel ith minimal human contact, ere fully
competent at this tas&. 6n the other hand, of nine chimpanzees tested, only to shoed any success.
+olves performed above chance, but not as ell as the dogs.
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8i&toria 9zetei and colleagues at 4:tv:s Lor;nd <niversity and the /ungarian Academy of 9ciences in
)udapest, found that dogs ill follo human gestures even over the evidence of their on senses. Although
the researchers used strong'smelling /ungarian salami, the dogs still ent to an empty container if the
e0perimenter pointed to it.
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,ogs also appear to understand hat people are thin&ing far more effectively than do chimpanzees.
,aniel 2ovinelli and colleagues at the >e 3beria research center in Louisiana gave chimpanzees the choice
beteen begging for food from somebody ho could see them, and someone ho could not. 9urprisingly,
chimps shoed little understanding that there as no point in begging for food from somebody ith a buc&et
over her head.
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@sAfia 8ir;nyi and colleagues replicated this simple test on some )udapest dogs. (he dogs
ere confronted by to unfamiliar omen, each holding a liver sandich. 6ne person faced the dog hile the
other loo&ed aay. <nli&e the chimpanzees in Louisiana, )udapest dogs spontaneously begged from only the
person ho as loo&ing at them.
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,ogs can also use their on gazes to direct a person's attention. Cd;m 1i&lAsi and colleagues in
)udapest hid a dog's favored toy or piece of food in one of three locations in the absence of the dog's oner.
+hen the oners returned, 1i&lAsi found that the restrained dogs literally shoed their oners here the
desired obDect had been hidden, by first bar&ing to get their attention and then loo&ing bac& and forth
beteen the obDect's location and the oners.
E
3n every case the oner as able to locate the food or toy
based solely on the dog's communicative glances.
%&' O (E) *#CO 1ost dog oners notice that their pets understand at least a fe ords. ,arin's
neighbor at ,on, 9ir John Lubboc& !a ban&er and &een contributor to several branches of science#, as one
of the first to test ho much human language dogs understand. Lubboc& placed cards ith different ords on
them in front of his poodle, 8an. +hatever 8an selected he received. Lubboc& as greatly impressed by the
fre-uency ith hich 8an brought the card ith the ord "food" ritten on it.
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(here is, hoever, no need to suppose 8an as communicating his thoughts to Lubboc&. 3t is far more
parsimonious to assume that the dog's actions ere a product of the la of effectF )ehaviors that produce
desired conse-uences ill be repeated.
A far more compelling study of language comprehension in dogs appeared this past summer. Juliane
Gamins&i and colleagues in Leipzig found a border collie, $ico, ho &ne the names of over 7HH obDects. $ico
could be ordered into a room to collect a named item from among nine other items ith hich he as also
familiar. $ico must have been responding based Dust on the name of the item, because oner and
e0perimenter remained in one room hile the dog ent into the other to ma&e his selection.
I
1ore
remar&able than Dust his vocabulary as $ico's ability to learn ne ords through a process &non as fast
mapping. (he e0perimenters used a ord that as not familiar to $ico and sent him into a room that
contained eight items. 9even of these obDects ere familiar but he did not &no the name of the eighth. 3n
seven out of ten tests ith novel ords $ico appropriately retrieved a different novel item each time. As
Gamins&i and colleagues conclude, "Apparently he as able to lin& the novel ord to the novel item based on
e0clusion learning."
Austrian philosopher Ludig +ittgenstein once remar&ed, "/oever elo-uently Jyour dogK may bar&,
he cannot tell you that his parents ere honest though poor."
L
9o, e should be careful to &eep $ico's
achievements in perspective. %or one thing, $ico forgot half of his nely learned ords ithin four ee&s.
Also, e should be ary of concluding that because dogs can respond to ords as commands to fetch obDects
that they have any understanding of grammar or synta0. >o one yet has presented evidence that a dog can
distinguish the difference beteen "man bites dog" and "dog bites man."
!E %#& (%Y W%G (he effort to find aspects of human intelligence in chimpanzees as 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. )ut for all that genetic pro0imity, chimps have spent
rather little time interacting ith us. ,ogs may not be &in, but they have been &ith for more than 1H,HHH
years. A burial site in 3srael from 17,HHH years ago contains the bodies of an old oman ith her puppy.
1H
,>A evidence suggests the association may go bac& as far as 1HH,HHH years.
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+hatever 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. %iguring out hat these odd, hairless apes ere up to
has been a maDor selection pressure on domestic dogsF %irst through natural selection, dogs that scrounged
around human camps had more offspring than those that fended for themselvesM later through artificial
selection, people selectively bred the traits they anted to see in companion animals. 9uch an evolutionary
account of dog smarts gains support from evidence that olves do not share dogs' successes in
communicating ith people.
3n 9eden, Genth 9vartberg and )D:rn %or&man tested more than 1B,HHH dogs from 1E? different
breeds to uncover the species' fundamental personality traits. %ive basic dimensions of canine character
emerged. %our of these five are similar to ell'established dimensions of human personalityF playfulness,
curiosity, sociability, and aggressiveness.
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6nly chase proneness seems outside the human realm of
e0perience. Jay Leno might be surprised at ho close to the mar& he asF ,ogs really do have a lot in
common ith people. %inding the limits of that similarity promises to be a rich research seam for some time
to come.
Clive Wynne) is an associate pro+essor in psychology at the University o+ Florida) and studies animal
,ehavior in species ranging +rom pigeons to marsupials- !is latest ,oo. is Do Animals Think? pu,lished ,y
"rinceton University "ress-
*e+erences
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