Inside Of A Dog Part 9

Dogs also approach the blindfolded persons warily-as befits the situation, if one isn't let in on the fact of being a subject in an experiment. These experiments using unresponsive, oddly outfitted characters are typical of psychological tests. At some level, they are useful in order to avoid the possibility that the subject has had experience with the setting they are about to encounter. In other words, the tests aim to get at what the dogs intuitively understand about the knowledge states of the human, not what the dog might have learned about what to do when you see someone who is blindfolded. Still, the dog is confronted with what must be a strange couple of hours.

Variations of the begging trials were first run with chimpanzees. In that context, the attentional state of the human was taken to indicate something about her knowledge. Someone who sees food baited in one of two hidden bins is "knowledgeable"; someone who stands idly by in the same room, but has a bucket over her head, is not. Did the chimps then beg to the knowledgeable person or to the one who is guessing at the location of the food (by chance guessing correctly once in a while)? Over time, chimps learn to beg to the knowledgeable informant-but only when the guesser has been out of the room, or has her back turned when the bin is baited. When the guesser simply has her eyes blocked-with a bucket, paper bag, or blindfold-the chimps begged to her, too.

Dogs have gone through trials with odd humans wearing buckets, blindfolds, or holding books in front of their eyes, blocking their vision. They outperform chimps: dogs preferentially beg to the looking-to those whose eyes they can see. This is just how we act, preferring to talk, cajole, invite, or solicit those whose eyes are visible. Eyes equal attention equals knowledge.

Best, dogs use this knowledge for manipulative ends. Researchers have found that dogs not only understand when we are attentive, but are sensitive to what they can get away with at different levels of their owners' attention. In one experiment, after being instructed to lie down lie down (and dutifully so doing), dogs were observed in three trials. In the first condition, an owner stood and stared at her dog. The result? The dog stayed lying down: perfectly obedient. In the second condition, the owner proceeded to sit down and watch television: here the dog paused, but shortly disobeyed and got up. And in the third condition, the owner didn't just ignore the dog but left the room entirely, leaving the dog alone with his owner's command still echoing in his ears. (and dutifully so doing), dogs were observed in three trials. In the first condition, an owner stood and stared at her dog. The result? The dog stayed lying down: perfectly obedient. In the second condition, the owner proceeded to sit down and watch television: here the dog paused, but shortly disobeyed and got up. And in the third condition, the owner didn't just ignore the dog but left the room entirely, leaving the dog alone with his owner's command still echoing in his ears.

Apparently the echo was not long-lasting, for in these trials the dogs were quickest and likeliest to disobey the same command so well heeded when the owner was around. What is surprising is not that the dogs disobeyed when the owner left. It is, instead, that dogs do what two-year-olds, chimps, monkeys, and no other animals seem to do: simply notice exactly how attentive someone is, and vary their own behavior accordingly. The dogs methodically used the level of their owners' attention to determine under what circ.u.mstances they were free to break the owners' rules-just as they used the information from other dogs to get attention back toward them in play.

The dogs' attention-reading is highly contextual, however. When the same experiment was run using food, that great motivator to perform at their best, the threshold to disobedience was lowered: dogs disobeyed more quickly, and at lower levels of owner distraction. When the owner's attention was harder to gauge-when she was talking with someone else, or sitting quietly with closed eyes-the dogs' behavior was mixed. Some sat patiently, but, seemingly gathering steam, were prepared to spring up at once as soon as the owner left the room. Other dogs took even longer to disobey when the owners left the room than when they were in it but otherwise engaged. This illogic might be explained by a developmental fact, one that would vary dog to dog. Some owners establish a routine of a sequence of commands: sit! stay! sit! stay! (long torturous pause), (long torturous pause), okay! okay! In that routine, one might have to wait an awfully long time before being given the okay to go at the food. Dogs put up with this game of ours with admirable self-possession. But if the owner starts chatting with someone else in the room-busying himself with someone else's attention-why, the game is off. In that routine, one might have to wait an awfully long time before being given the okay to go at the food. Dogs put up with this game of ours with admirable self-possession. But if the owner starts chatting with someone else in the room-busying himself with someone else's attention-why, the game is off.

Lest you think that you can use this knowledge to trick your dog into behaving himself while you are at work by simply pretending to be home with him-over speakerphone or video-one experiment brings very disappointing news. When a life-sized video image (in visible digital) of the owner was displayed before dogs, they disobeyed at levels befitting being home alone with no supervision. While they could use their video-owners' pointing hints to help find food, they didn't bother to follow many of their verbal commands. Dogs are dutiful, but more selectively dutiful when the owner is reduced to a videotape. You cannot hope to reduce your dog's lonely wailing by telling him to stop over the answering machine-but you might be able to tell him where he can find that treat you left out for him. When you next visit the zoo, check in on the monkey cages. Maybe there are capuchin monkeys, quick-moving, tail-flaunting animals who leap easily and shriek piercingly. Or colobus, slow-moving leaf-eaters whose black-and-white coats often hide a small colobus clinging inside. Watch the male snow monkeys as they follow around the red-bottomed females. There is much to recognize here in our distant evolutionary cousins. We see their interests, their fears, their l.u.s.ts. And most will notice and respond to you-most likely by moving farther away, or turning their heads to avoid your gaze. What is surprising is that dogs, so much less humanlike than these primates, are so much better at realizing what is behind our gaze, how to use it to get information or to their advantage. Dogs can see us as our primate cousins cannot.

Canine Anthropologists

I am I because my little dog knows me.

-GERTRUDE STEIN The dog's gaze is an examination, a regard: a gaze at another animate creature. He sees us, which might imply that he thinks about us-and we like to be considered. Naturally we wonder, in that moment of shared gaze, Is the dog thinking about us the way we are thinking about the dog? What does he know about us?

We are known by our dogs-probably far better than we know them. They are the consummate eavesdroppers and peeping Toms: let into the privacy of our rooms, they quietly spy on our every move. They know about our comings and goings. They come to know our habits: how long we spend in the bathroom, how long we spend in front of the television. They know whom we sleep with; what we eat; what we eat too much of; whom we sleep too much with. They watch us like no other animal watches us. We share our homes with uncounted numbers of mice, millipedes, and mites: none bothers to look our way. We open our door and see pigeons, squirrels, and a.s.sorted flying bugs; they barely notice us. Dogs, by contrast, watch us from across the room, from the window, and out of the corner of their eyes. Their watching is enabled by a subtle but powerful ability that begins with simple vision. Sight is used to pay visual attention, and visual attention is used to see what we we attend to. In some ways this is similar to us, but in other ways it surpa.s.ses human capacity. attend to. In some ways this is similar to us, but in other ways it surpa.s.ses human capacity.

The blind and the deaf sometimes keep dogs to see or hear the world for them. For some disabled persons, a dog may enable movement through a world they cannot navigate alone. Just as for the physically impaired dogs can act as eyes, ears, and feet, so also do they act as readers of human behavior for some autistic individuals. Persons with any kind of autism spectrum disorder are united by their shared inability to understand the expressions, emotions, and perspectives of other people. As the neurologist Oliver Sacks describes, for an autistic person who keeps dogs, the dogs may seem to be human-mind-readers. While an autistic person cannot pa.r.s.e a brow furrowed with concern, or interpret the rising tone indicating someone's fright or worry, the dog is sensitive to the mind-set behind them.

Dogs are anthropologists among us. They are students of behavior, observing us in the way that the science of anthropology teaches its pract.i.tioners to look at humans. As adults, we walk among other humans largely without examining them closely, socially trained to keep to ourselves. Even with those we know best, we might stop attending to the minute changes in their expressions, their moods, their outlooks. The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget suggested that as children we are little scientists, forming theories about the world and testing them by acting. If so, we are scientists who hone our skills only to later neglect them. We mature by learning how people behave, but eventually we pay less attention to how others are behaving at every instant. We outgrow the habit of looking. A curious child stares with fascination at the stranger limping down the street: he will be taught this is not polite. A child might be enraptured by a swirl of fallen leaves on the pavement; by adulthood, he will overlook it. The child wonders at our crying, monitors our smiles, looks where we look; with age we are all still able to do all this, but we fall out of the habit.

Dogs don't stop looking-at the gimpy walk, at a rush of leaves tumbling down the sidewalk, at our faces. The urban dog may be bereft of natural sights, but he is rich in the odd: the drunken man swerving through the crowd, the shouting sidewalk preacher, the lame and dest.i.tute. All get long stares from the dogs who pa.s.s them. What makes dogs good anthropologists is that they are so attuned to humans: they notice what is typical, and what is different. And, just as crucially, they don't become inured to us, as we do-nor do they grow up to be us.

DOGS' PSYCHIC POWERS DECONSTRUCTED.

This attunement to us feels magical. Dogs are able to antic.i.p.ate us-and, it seems, to know something essential about us and others. Is this clairvoyance? A sixth sense?

I am reminded of the story of a horse. At the turn of the twentieth century, the actions of the horse Hans, whose ironic sobriquet, "Clever Hans," has come to stand both for what he could not do, and as a warning against overattributions to animals, helped shape the course of animal cognition research for the next hundred years.

Hans, his owner claimed, could count. Shown an arithmetic problem written on a blackboard, Hans tapped out the sum on the earth with his hoof. Though he had been encouraged and reinforced, using straightforward conditioning, for tapping, this was not a rote response to predetermined questions: he was excellent at all sums, with novel problems, and even when the questioner was someone other than his trainer.

Such was the tenor of the time that this discovered, presumed latent cognitive ability of horses created a small furor. Animal trainers and academics alike were stumped as to how Hans was doing it. It almost looked as though there were no other explanation than that he was actually doing arithmetic.

Finally, the trick-an inadvertent trick, unknown even to his owner-was discovered by a psychologist named Oskar Pfungst. When the questioner himself was prevented from knowing the answer to the problem, Hans's math was wildly off. Hans was not counting, and he was not psychic; he was simply reading the behavior of his questioners. They unconsciously tipped him off to the answer through small bodily movements: leaning forward or away from the horse when he'd tapped the correct sum; relaxing their shoulders and muscles of their face; inclining ever so slightly until the answer was reached.

Clever Hans stood, and still stands, as a cautionary tale against a.s.signing to animals abilities that could be explained by simpler mechanisms. But thinking about the dog's use of attention reminds me of Hans's skill. While Hans was not clever in the way advertised, he was remarkably clever at reading the inadvertent signals given by the persons quizzing him. Before an audience of hundreds, only Hans noticed his trainer leaning forward, his body tensing and relaxing, which Hans had figured out meant that he was to stop tapping his hoof. He attended to the very cues that had information: an attention far greater than the human spectators brought to the event.

Hans's preternatural sensitivity may have ensued, paradoxically, from other deficits. Since he presumably didn't have any notion about numbers or arithmetic, he was not distracted by those stimuli. By contrast, our attention to the seemingly salient details would lead us to miss the one clear indication of the answer.

An experimental psychologist I've met who does research with pigeons demonstrates this phenomenon when teaching his undergraduate cla.s.s. He shows the students a series of slides of bar graphs with blue bars of various lengths set against a white background. The slides fall into one of two categories, he says: those that have some unspecified "x-ness" feature, and those that don't. He points out which slides are members of the x-ness category. He then puts it to the students to use the example slides to figure out what the conditions for x-ness are.

After many minutes of frustrated and failing attempts by the students, he reveals that pigeons trained on a set of members with x-ness can without fail tell of a new graph whether it satisfies this elusive criterion or not. The students s.h.i.+ft uncomfortably in their seats. Still, not a person comes up with the answer. Finally, their professor fills them in: those slides that are mostly blue are members of the x-ness category; those that are more white are not.

The students are outraged: they've been outsmarted by pigeons. In running this test with my psychology cla.s.ses, I find they also decry the task. Though no student has ever come up with the answer, they all later complain that the answer is unfair. They were looking for some complicated relations.h.i.+p between the bars-one consistent with the kinds of relations.h.i.+ps between features that bar graphs are meant to represent. But there is none. "X-ness" is simply "more blue." Only pigeons, blissfully unaware of bar graphs, saw them for their colors and perceived the true categories.

What dogs do is a version of what Hans and the pigeons did. Anecdotal tales of this kind of phenomenon abound. One trainer of search-and-rescue dogs put his hands on his hips in exasperation when the dog was following the wrong path. Another rubbed his chin uneasily. In both cases, the dogs learned to use the cues of their trainers as information that they were off the trail. (The trainers had to be trained to tone down their cuing.) As we look for the more complex explanation for an event, or for others' behavior, we may overlook clues that dogs see naturally. It is less extrasensory perception than the well-added sum of their ordinary senses. Dogs use their sensory skills in combination with their attention to us. Without their interest in our attention, they would not perceive the subtle differences in our strides and body postures and stress levels as important bits of information. It allows them to predict us and to reveal us.

READING US.

The dog observes us, thinks about us, knows knows us. Do they then have some special knowledge about us, born of their attention to us and to our attention? They do. us. Do they then have some special knowledge about us, born of their attention to us and to our attention? They do.

In a nonverbal way, dogs know who we are, they know what we do, and they know some things about us unknown to ourselves. We're knowable by look, and even more so by our smells. Over and above that, how we act defines who we are. Part of my recognition of Pump is not just of her visage; it is of her walk: her slightly off-kilter, jaunty trot with her droopy ears bouncing in step. For dogs, too, the ident.i.ty of a person is not just how she smells and looks; it is how she moves. We are recognizable by our behavior.

Even our most ordinary behavior-walking across a room in our characteristic style-is chock full of information that the dog can mine. All dog owners watch their pups' growing sensitivity to the rituals that precede going for what in many dog-peopled households is called a W-A-L-K.*

Dogs quickly learn to recognize shoe donning, of course; we come to expect that grabbing a leash or a jacket will clue them in; a regular walk time explains their prescience; but what if all you did was look up from your work or rise from your seat before your dog was on to you?

If done suddenly, or if you cross the room with a purposeful stride, an attentive dog has all the information he needs. Habitual watcher of your behavior, he sees your intent even when you think you are giving nothing away. As we've seen, dogs are very sensitive to gaze and thus to changes in our gaze. The difference between a head lifted up or angled down, away from them or toward them, is large for an animal so sensitive to eye contact. Even small movements of the hands or adjustments of the body attract notice. Spend three hours looking at a computer screen, hands tethered to the keyboard, then look up and stretch your arms overhead-this is a metamorphosis! The redirection of your attention is clear-and a hopeful dog can easily interpret it as a prelude to a walk. An acute human observer would notice this, too, but we rarely let others oversee us so closely in our daily affairs. (Nor do we find it terribly interesting to so oversee.)

Their facility at antic.i.p.ation of our actions is part anatomy and part psychology. Their anatomy-all those rod photoreceptors-allows them a millisecond head start on noticing motion. They react before we see that there is something to react to. The critical psychologies are of antic.i.p.ation-predicting the future from the past-and of a.s.sociation. Familiarity with your typical movements is necessary in order to so antic.i.p.ate you: a new puppy might not be tricked by a feigned tennis-ball toss, but with age he will be. Even without familiarity, dogs are skilled at making a.s.sociations between events-between the arrival of one's mother and the delivery of food; between a s.h.i.+ft in your focus and the promise of a walk.

Dogs pick up the theme of our quotidian habits, and thus are especially sensitive to variations in them. Just as we often take the same route to our cars, to work, to the subway, we take our dogs on similar walks. Over time, they learn the route themselves, and can antic.i.p.ate that we turn left past the hedgerow and make a sharp right at the corner with the fireplug. If we introduce a new detour on our way home, even an unnecessary one-circling around the block an additional go-dogs adjust to the new route after just a few outings. And they even begin heading in the direction of the detour before their owner makes any movements in that direction. This makes them fine, cooperative walking companions-better than many humans I perambulate the city with, whom I constantly knock into as I lead them on a preferred route.

The complement of dogs' antic.i.p.atory prowess is their purported character-reading ability. Plenty of people let their dogs choose their potential romantic partners. Others declare their dog a good judge of character, able to spot a duplicitous person, a bad sort, on first meeting. They may seem to recognize someone who is not to be trusted.* What this ability might come down to is their close looking at our looking. If you feel hesitant about an approaching stranger, you reveal it, however unintentionally. Dogs are, as we have seen, sensitive to the olfactory changes that come with stress; they can also notice tensing muscles and the auditory change of quick breathing or gasping. (These physiological changes are among those measured by lie detectors: one might imagine that a trained dog could subst.i.tute both for the machine and its technician.) But they will let their visual ability trump these notes when a.s.sessing a new person or trying to solve a problem. We all have characteristic behaviors we display when angry, nervous, or excited. "Untrustworthy" people often glance furtively in conversation. Dogs notice this gaze. An aggressive stranger may make bold eye contact, move unnaturally slowly or quickly, or veer oddly from a straight path before doing any actual aggression. Dogs notice the behavior; they react viscerally to the meeting of eyes.

One winter we took a trip north, to a place of a.s.sertive winter and genuine cold, and were treated to a large snowstorm. We pulled out sleds, found a great big hill, and proceeded to plow an erratic track down it. Pump was suddenly overcome, and ferociously pursued us on each ride downhill, biting, grabbing, and growling at our faces. When it was my fast-moving, snow-covered face being attacked, I couldn't stop her for all my laughing. She was playing, but it was a play I have not seen before: tinged with real aggression. When I managed to rise and shake off the covering of snow I'd gathered on the way down, she calmed at once.

Does this clairvoyance mean that dogs can't be fooled? No. They are astute watchers, but they are not mind readers, nor are they immune from being misled. I was changed changed for Pump when I leapt on that sled: I was horizontal; I was enrobed in snow gear and snow; and most critically, I was moving entirely differently. I was suddenly a smoothly moving, high-speed prey animal, not an upright, ambling companion. for Pump when I leapt on that sled: I was horizontal; I was enrobed in snow gear and snow; and most critically, I was moving entirely differently. I was suddenly a smoothly moving, high-speed prey animal, not an upright, ambling companion.

My dog may have a particular interest in sledders, but her behavior is similar to many other dogs' chasing behaviors. Dogs often chase bicyclists, skateboarders, RollerBladers, cars, or runners. The general-purpose answer given for why they do this is usually that they have an instinct to chase prey. This answer is not entirely wrong, but it is mightily incomplete. It is not quite that dogs think of these objects or persons as "prey," per se. Your motion reveals another dimension to you: you you roll! quickly! roll! quickly! It is an attribute that alters you in the dog's eyes, which are especially responsive to a certain kind of motion. Mounting and riding a bicycle, you have not turned to prey-as indicated by the fact that your dog greets you, not eats you, on dismount. Their responsive sensitivity probably evolved as a prey-detection tactic, but it will be applied variously. It lends to the dog's experience an additional way to interpret objects and animals in the environment. That way is by the quality of their motion. It is an attribute that alters you in the dog's eyes, which are especially responsive to a certain kind of motion. Mounting and riding a bicycle, you have not turned to prey-as indicated by the fact that your dog greets you, not eats you, on dismount. Their responsive sensitivity probably evolved as a prey-detection tactic, but it will be applied variously. It lends to the dog's experience an additional way to interpret objects and animals in the environment. That way is by the quality of their motion.

There are shared components of sledding, bicycling, or running: a person is moving in a certain way-smoothly and quickly. Walkers are moving, but not quickly: they are not chased. Pump did not recognize me sledding because ordinarily, much as I would like to think otherwise, I am not particularly smooth nor quick in my motions. There is an excess of vertical movement in my walk; I weave to and fro; I gesture a lot-all frivolous in making forward progress.

To stop a dog pursuing a bicycle with a predatory glint in his eye, one can simply interrupt the illusion: stop the bike. The chasing impulse triggered by the visual cells that detected the motion will itself let up. (The hormones involved in the arousal of barking and chasing such a smooth and quick mover may still be coursing through his system, though, for a few minutes.)

Science has confirmed the importance of behavior in ident.i.ty. Our ident.i.ties, who we are, are defined partly by our actions, so we can examine how actions inform recognition of personal ident.i.ty. In one experiment, dogs showed that they have no difficulty distinguis.h.i.+ng friendly and unfriendly strangers: those demonstrating different ident.i.ties. To do this, the experimenters divided partic.i.p.ants into two groups and asked members of each group to behave in a prescribed manner. Friendly behavior included walking at a normal speed, talking to the dog in a cheerful voice, and gently petting the dog. Unfriendly behavior included actions that could be interpreted as threatening: an erratic, hesitating approach combined with staring at the eyes of the dog without talking.

The main result of the experiment is not all that surprising: the dogs approached the friendly and avoided the unfriendly. But there's a hidden gem in the experiment. The key trial was this: How did the dogs act when a formerly friendly person suddenly acted threatening? The dogs acted variably: For some, the person was now a different kind of person altogether-an unfriendly one, her ident.i.ty changed. To others, the olfactory recognition of the stranger who had been friendly trumped this new odd behavior.

These people began as strangers to the dog, but over the course of the sessions, dogs became familiar with the various people: they became "less strange." Their ident.i.ty was defined in part by their smell and in part by their behavior.

ALL ABOUT YOU.

The combination of dogs' attention to us and their sensory prowess is explosive. We have seen their detection of our health, our truthfulness, even our relation to one another. And they know things about us at this very moment that we might not even be able to articulate.

The results of one study indicate that dogs pick up on our hormonal levels in interaction with them. Looking at owners and dogs partic.i.p.ating in agility trials, the researchers found a correlation between two hormones: the men's testosterone levels, and the dogs' cortisol levels. Cortisol is a stress hormone-useful for mobilizing your response to, say, flee from that ravenous lion-but also produced in conditions that are more psychologically than mortally urgent. Increases in the level of the hormone testosterone accompany many potent elements of behavior: s.e.x drive, aggression, dominance displays. The higher the men's pre-agility-compet.i.tion hormonal levels, the higher the increase in the level of stress in the dogs (if the team lost). In a sense, the dogs somehow knew that their owner's hormonal level was high, by observing behavior or through scent or both-and they "caught" the emotion themselves. In another study, dogs' cortisol levels revealed that they were even sensitive to the style style of play of human playmates. Those dogs playing with people who used commands during play-telling the dog to sit, lie down, or listen-wound up with higher postplay cortisol levels; those playing with people who played more freely and with enthusiasm had lower cortisol at play's end. Dogs know, and are infected by, our intent, even in play. of play of human playmates. Those dogs playing with people who used commands during play-telling the dog to sit, lie down, or listen-wound up with higher postplay cortisol levels; those playing with people who played more freely and with enthusiasm had lower cortisol at play's end. Dogs know, and are infected by, our intent, even in play.