sheer amount of time spent around humans – that’s why puppy socialization is so important. The answer might be a combination of these two factors – of evolution and socialization. Either way, the result is a species with a remarkable fondness for and understanding of humans. This manifests in many ways. Zachary Silver, a Ph.D. student in the Comparative Cognition Lab at Yale University, studies the way dogs interpret the social world. “They’re extremely skillful at following our communicative cues, especially our points and our gazes,” he told me. “But it even goes a step further: they pay really close attention to how we interact with each other.” For instance, there’s evidence to suggest that, in some contexts, dogs will notice whether a human is helpful or unhelpful, and favor the helpful person.
dogs’ understanding of humans’ perspectives: he’s working to build on previous findings indicating that, in some contexts, if food is hidden such that a dog sees one person observe the hiding and one miss it, they are more likely to take a hint about its whereabouts from the person who watched it being hidden. This suggests that dogs might be drawing all sorts of complex conclusions about what we know and feel. As Silver observes, “Dogs do pretty sophisticated things regarding understanding our own perspective.” The Dog’s Nose Knows If humans want to understand what it’s like to be a dog, the nose is an excellent place to start. It’s well known that dogs have a much more powerful sense of smell than humans, but did you know just how much more powerful? As Alexandra Horowitz outlines in her New York
Times bestselling book “Being a Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell”: Explosives-detection dogs smell as little as a picogram—a trillionth of a gram— of TNT or other explosive. What might it be like to notice a picogram of an odor? … The average cinnamon roll has about a gram of cinnamon in it. Sure, the human nose is on it, from the moment we open the door of the house. Now imagine the smell of one trillion cinnamon rolls. That’s what the dog coming in with us smells when we enter.
This sense of smell gives dogs remarkable insights into their
environment. Horowitz notes that a tracking dog can tell which direction someone is moving in from smelling just five of their footprints. And in some European countries, dogs’ noses now have the legal seal of approval: if a dog is able to identify a suspect based on smells left at the crime scene, that evidence is admissible in court.
Silver’s current research focuses on
This sensory difference is
important because it gives us information about how dogs experience and interpret the world. Humans are primarily visual creatures, navigating by sight. Dogs, by contrast, process the world through their noses, and thus have all kinds of scent skills that are difficult for humans to conceive of.
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