Read Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know Online

Authors: Alexandra Horowitz

Tags: #General, #Dogs, #Science, #Life Sciences, #Psychology, #Cognitive Psychology, #Dogs - Psychology, #Pets, #Zoology, #Breeds

Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (19 page)

BOOK: Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know
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Given how dogs see, how do they apply their visual ability? Cleverly: they look at us. Once a dog has opened up his eyes to us, a remarkable thing happens. He starts gazing at us. Dogs see us, but the differences in their vision also seem to allow them to see things about us that even we do not see. Soon it seems they are looking straight into our minds.

Seen by a Dog
I am startled and a little flustered to look up from my work and see Pump watching me, her eyes trained on mine. There is a powerful pull to a dog who looks you in the eyes. I am on her radar: it feels that she is looking not just at me, but to—and into—me.
Look a dog in the eyes and you get the definite feeling that he is looking back. Dogs return our gaze. Their look is more than just setting eyes on us; they are looking at us in the same way that we look at them. The importance of the dog's gaze, when it is directed at our faces, is that gaze implies a frame of mind. It implies attention. A gazer is both paying attention to you and, possibly, paying attention to your own attention.
At its most basic level,
attention
is a process of bringing forward some aspects of all the stimuli bombarding an individual in a moment. Visual attention begins with
looking;
auditory attention with
hearing:
both are possible for all animals with eyes and ears. Just having the sensory apparatuses isn't sufficient to do what we generally mean by
paying attention,
though: considering what it is one has turned to look or hear.
When invoked by psychologists, attention is treated not just as turning the head toward a stimulus, but as something else in addition: a state of mind that indicates interest, intent. In attending to someone else's head turns, one may be demonstrating an understanding of the psychological states of other people—a distinctively human skill. We attend to others' attention because it helps to predict what that someone other will do next, or what he can see and what he might know. One of the deficits that many people with autism have is an inability, or lack of inclination, to look at other people's eyes. As a result, they aren't instinctively able to understand when other people are paying attention—or how to manipulate others' attention.
The simple ability to focus on some things while ignoring others is crucial for any animal: objects one sees, smells, or hears may be more or less relevant for survival. Attend to those that are relevant; ignore the rest of the visual landscape or the confusion of sounds. Even with survival no longer our most pressing concern, humans are constantly trying to direct, divert, or attract attention. Some attention mechanism is required to do all the ordinary things of our days: to listen to someone talking to us, to plan a walking route to work, even to remember what one was thinking a moment ago.
Dogs, social animals like us, and also more or less relieved of survival pressures, surely have some interesting mechanisms with which to attend to the world. By virtue of their different sensory abilities, though, they are able to attend to things we never notice, such as how our odor changes through the day. Likewise, we focus carefully on things that dogs do not even detect, such as subtle differences in language use.
But what distinguishes dogs from other mammals, even other domesticated mammals, is the way that their attention overlaps with ours. Like us, they pay attention to
humans:
to our location, subtle movements, moods, and, most avidly, to our faces. A popular conception of animals is that if they look at us at all, it is from fear or appetite, monitoring us as possible predator or prey. Not true: the dog looks very particularly at humans.
Just how particularly is the subject of a mad rush of contemporary research into dog cognitive abilities. This research uses as markers the landmarks in the development of human infants into human adults, which is well documented, and which result is obvious: by adulthood, we all understand what it means to pay attention. What the dog research is revealing is that dogs have some of the same abilities that we do.
THE EYES OF A CHILD
For dogs and humans both, it all begins with a few innate behavioral tendencies. Having and understanding attention is not automatic, but it develops naturally from these instincts. Human infants, like most animals, have a basic orienting reflex: move, as best or as much as you can, toward a source of warmth, food, or safety. Newborns turn their faces toward warmth and suck: the rooting reflex. At that age, infants can do little more. Ducklings, more precocious, relentlessly chase after the first adult creature they see.* In both ducklings and humanlings, this reflex relies on an early perceptual ability: having at least
noticed
the presence of others. It is an ability that helps us, in our first few years, learn about the important fact of others' attention.

For humans, there is a reliable course of development through infancy of certain behaviors associated with this growing understanding of other people. It is all about learning to attend to the right—human—things in the world, and beginning to understand that others are attending, too. And it begins as soon as they open their eyes. Newborn babies can see, although not much. They are incredibly nearsighted: peering, cooing faces brought just inches from their own may be clear, but that is about the extent of clarity of the world. One of the first things infants notice is any faces nearby. In fact our brains have specialized neurons that fire when we see a face. Infants can detect, and prefer to look at, a face or something facelike—even three points forming a V—rather than other visual scenes. From early in their lives, infants stare longer* at that which interests them, the mother's face being among the first items of interest. Soon infants also learn to distinguish a face looking toward them from one looking away. This is a simple skill, but not a trivial one: out of the visual cacophony of the world, they must start noticing that there are objects, that some of those objects are alive, that some of those alive objects are of particular interest, and that some of those interesting live objects attend to you when they face you.

Once that is established, and their own visual acuity improves, infants focus on the details in that face. They delight at peekaboo: a game playing simply with the importance of eyes. As psychologists have shown by sticking out their tongues and making faces at infants, very young infants can imitate simple expressions. Of course, these expressions don't have the meaning that they will later (we must assume that the infant is not actually sticking his tongue out spitefully at the psychologist, though one might wish it so). Infants are simply learning to use their facial muscles. By three months, they've got it, and they start reacting to others by making faces and smiling socially. They move their heads to look at other faces nearby. By nine months old they are tracking other people's gaze and seeing where it lands. They might use that gaze to find some object that they have asked about, or that has been hidden from them. Soon they extend the line of gaze into a point with finger, fist, or arm to request an object, and by their first birthday, to show or share.
These behaviors reflect the infant's burgeoning understanding that other people have attention, attention that can light on objects of interest: a bottle, a toy, or them. Between twelve and eighteen months, they begin to engage in bouts of
joint
attention
with others: locking eyes, then looking to another object, then back to eye contact. This marks a breakthrough: to achieve full "jointness" the infant must on some level understand that not only are they both looking together, they are
attending
together. They are understanding that there is some invisible but real connection between other people and the objects that are in their line of vision. Once they do this, all hell can break loose. Infants can start manipulating others' attention simply by gazing someplace. They check where other people are looking and pointing, and they begin to notice if adults are looking at them while they are doing activities they want to share (or conceal). They will give an anticipatory glance at an adult before pointing or showing themselves. They work very hard to get attention looking at them. And they may begin avoiding attention: going out of a room at key moments, or concealing objects from an adult's view. (This prepares them well for being difficult adolescents.)
We all become characteristically human by this same developmental route. Within a few years an infant goes from aimlessly looking out of new eyes, to looking meaningfully, to gazing at others, to following the gaze of others. They happily hold eye contact. Before long they are using gaze to get information, to manipulate the gaze of others—by distraction, gaze avoidance, or pointing—and to get attention. At some point, they come to a realization about the fact of the mind behind someone else's gaze.
THE ATTENTION OF ANIMALS

She comes within an inch of me and starts panting at me, eyes wide and unblinking, to tell me that she needs something.

Step-by-step, cognition researchers have been tracing this developmental course with a new subject: non-human animals. How much of the infant's trajectory is followed by animals? After they open their eyes, do they look with intention? Do they notice others' eyes? Do they understand the importance of attention?
This is one facet of the study of animal cognition, which asks what an animal subject understands about the "mental states" of others. Most of the experimental tests run with animals are of the kind we feel sure we humans excel at: tests of physical and social cognition. Captive animals from sea slugs to pigeons to prairie dogs to chimpanzees have been set into mazes; presented with counting, categorizing, and naming tasks; asked to discriminate, learn, and remember series of numbers and pictures. Tasks are devised to see if they recognize, imitate, or deceive others—or even recognize themselves. And in some tests, the question is even more characteristically human: of the kind of social thinking going on when animals interact—with members of their own species, and with those of other species. When a caged chimpanzee looks at a human attendant, is he considering anything about the attendant? Does he wonder how to get her to open the door (does he wonder anything at all?), or is he simply waiting to see what this colorful, animate object nearby does that might be relevant or interesting? Does a cat consider that mouse as an agent, as an animal with a life—or does he see the mouse as a moving meal that must be stopped and dismantled?
As we've touched on already, the subjective experience of animals is notoriously difficult to get at scientifically. No animal can be asked to relate its experience in voice or on paper,* so behavior must be our guide. Behavior has its pitfalls, too, since we cannot be positive that any two individuals' similar behavior indicates similar psychological states. For instance, I smile when I am happy … but I may also smile out of concern, uncertainty, or surprise. You smile back at me: it too might be happiness—or ironic detachment. To say nothing of the near impossibility of determining whether your "happiness" feels like mine does.
Still, even without having constant verification of others' mental states, behavior is a good enough guide to allow us to predict an animal's future behavior well enough to interact peacefully and productively. Thus we study what animals do—in particular, what they do that is like what humans do. Since using and following attention is so important in human social interaction, animal cognition researchers look for behaviors that indicate that an animal is using attention.

Dogs have recently trotted gamely into experimental labs, controlled outdoor facilities, and onto data sheets meant to gather information about their abilities at using attention. The dogs are put in controlled settings, usually with one or more experimenters present, and a hidden, desirable object: a toy or a food treat. By varying the cues that they use to inform the dogs about the location of the treat, the experimenters aim to determine which ones are meaningful to the dogs.

The question for researchers is just how far along these stages of the child's development of attention dogs go. Attention begins with gaze, and gaze requires visual capacity. We have already established what dogs can see; we know that they look. Do they understand attention?
BOOK: Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know
5.17Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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