After he got his doctorate in
biological anthropology from Harvard, Dr. Brian Hare and his colleagues finally published
their results: “Dogs could
indeed pass the pointing test, while wolves, their wild relatives, could not”.
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Photo: Brian Hare, associate professor at Duke University and chief scientific officer at Dognition, conducting the "folder game" with Finley – Carl Zimmer NYT 22.05.2103 |
Dr.
Hare, now an associate professor at Duke, has continued to probe the canine
mind, but his research has been constrained by the number of dogs he can study.
Now he hopes to expand his research geometrically - with the help of dog owners
around the world. He is the chief scientific officer of a new company called Dognition, which
produces a website where people can test their dog’s cognition, learn about
their pets and, Dr. Hare hopes, supply him and his colleagues with scientific
data on tens of thousands of dogs.
To explore dog cognition
further, he set up the Duke Canine Cognition Center in 2009. He and his colleagues built a
network of 1,000 dog owners willing to bring in their pets for tests to begin
to investigate new questions about dogs.
With a grant from the Office of
Naval Research he’s looking at ways to identify dogs for jobs like bomb
detection. He’s also trying to find the “cognitive
style” of the successful service dogs. To do so, he and his colleagues have
developed a battery of 30 tests that altogether take four hours to administer.
They have tested 200 dogs and are searching for hallmarks that set the service
dogs apart.
He helped form Dognition, he
said, partly because of interest from dog trainers who asked him if they could
test their own dogs’ cognitive style. The tests are now available online: For a
fee, dog owners get video instructions for how to carry them out. (Besides the
pointing test, they include a test in which the owner yawns and then watches to
see if the dog does too - a potential sign that dog and owner are strongly
bonded.) The company then analyses how a given dog compares with others in its
database for qualities like empathy and memory.
One hypothesis
has already emerged from Dognition’s users, Dr. Hare said. A surprising link
turned up between empathy in dogs and deception. The dogs that are most bonded
to their owners turn out to be most likely to observe their owner in order to
steal food. “I would not have thought to
test for that relationship at Duke, but with Dognition we can see it,” said
Dr. Hare.
Source: The New York Times
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