Originally published March 17, 2014 at 5:41 PM | Page modified March 17, 2014 at 6:53 PM
HARTFORD, Conn. When Porter the dog tries to figure out why his owner has placed a toy bone under a bucket, his response might provide some insight about human development, autism and other learning disabilities.
Thats the hope of Laurie Santos, who runs the Canine Cognition Center at Yale, which opened in December. She pointed to the 4-year-old chocolate Lab mix, brought in by psychology grad student Kristi Leimgruber. Porter is growing up in the same kind of environment as human children, Santos said, so comparing how he learns with the way people learn can tell us a lot about human development.
So much more than primates, dogs are more cued into what we care about and what we know, Santos said. And they might have been shaped in a way thats very different from any other animal species in part because, in a sense, they (behave) more like a human child whos cued in (to humans) than, say, a chimpanzee.
For all that we ask of dogs loyalty, companionship, slipper-fetching rarely have we asked what drives dogs. Thats starting to change in the world of academia, where the dogs status as a research subject has increased in recent years.
The Canine Cognition Center where Santos and her researchers study dogs decision-making processes and how they pick up on social cues is the latest example of a growing interest in how dogs can offer insights into behavioral and cognitive science. Santos is a professor of psychology, internationally known for her research of monkey behaviors.
Although she still studies monkeys, Santos said dogs may offer something to her research that monkeys cant.
More and more, were learning that, although monkeys are really good evolutionary models because theyre closely related to us, the environment theyre in and the way theyre raised is completely different, she said. So it would be great to get a new model that experiences some of same environments and might even experience some of the same selection pressures in evolution.
That, said Santos, is where dogs come in.
They dont have language and, obviously, theyre not human, yet they grow up in exactly the same environments as children and rely on some of the same kinds of cues, she said. So the question is, given that they have similar environments, what does that tell us about their cognition?
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Whats your dog thinking? Yale researchers want to know