Inside a Dog’s Mind

Scientist Carl Zimmer has an extended article in Time Magazine that examines recent research into how your dog thinks. Attempting to fathom their dog's mind is a favorite pastime of dog owners. "Everyone feels like an expert on their dog," says Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist at Barnard College and author of the new book Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. But until now, scientists had carried out limited studies to test those beliefs. This fall, Duke University anthropologist Brian Hare is opening the Duke Canine Cognition Center, where he plans to test hundreds of dogs brought in by their owners. Marc Hauser, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University, recently launched his own such research lab and has 1,000 dogs lined up as subjects. Other facilities are operating in the U.S. and Europe. What they've established out so far is that dogs can learn over 200 distinctive human words, but they may mean different things to a dog than to humans. And the intelligent, friendly, and obedient behavior we see in dogs evolved because those things are advantageous to the dog, even though we see them as advantageous to us.