Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [55]
Neuroscientists have identified an unusual brain disorder in some humans called "akinetopsia." These akinetopsics have a kind of motion blindness: they have difficulty integrating a sequence of images into the normal perception of motion. A person with akinetopsia may begin pouring a cup of tea and then not register a change until many images later, by which time the cup is overflowing. As non-brain-damaged persons are to akinetopsics, dogs are to us: they see the interstices between our moments. We must always seem a little slow. Our responses to the world are a split second behind the dogs'.
VISUAL UMWELT
With age, Pump suddenly became reluctant to enter the elevator, perhaps not seeing it well in the darkness after being outside. I encourage her, or jump in myself first, or throw something light-colored on the elevator floor for her to see. Finally, every time, she rallies and leaps in, as though crossing a great crevasse, brave girl.
So dogs can see some of the same things we do, but they don't see in the way that we do. The very construction of their visual capacity explains a broad swath of dog behavior. First, with a wide visual field, they see what is around them well, but what is right in front of them less well. Their own paws are probably not in terrific focus to dogs. What wonder then how little they use their paws, relative to our reliance on the end of our forelimbs, to manipulate the world. A small change in vision leads to less reaching, grabbing, and handling.
Similarly, dogs can bring our faces into focus, but detect eyes less well. This means they will catch your full facial expression better than a meaningful glare, and they will follow a point or a turn better than a surreptitious glance out of the corner of the eye. Their vision complements their other senses. While they can locate a sound in space only roughly, their hearing is good enough for them to turn their eyes in the right direction, so they can search further visually … and then examine closely by nose.
For instance, dogs recognize us by our smells—but they also clearly look at us. What are they seeing? If your smell is not available—you are downwind or you're covered in perfume—they can use visual cues exclusively. They will hesitate if they hear your voice calling them, but it is not your face atop the approaching person, or your particular walk, or your mouth moving to call their name. Recent research confirmed this by examining dogs' behavior when they heard their owner's voice or a stranger's voice, accompanied by either a picture of the owner's face (on a large monitor) or of a stranger's face. The dogs looked longer at the incongruous faces: the owner's face, when paired with a stranger's voice, and the stranger's face, when it appeared with the owner's voice. If it were just that the dog preferred the owner's face, they would have always gazed at that face the longest. Instead they looked longest when there was something surprising: a mismatch.
The physical elements of vision define and circumscribe what the dog experiences. There is a further element of that experience: the role vision plays in the hierarchy of senses. For visual creatures like humans, there is particular delight when we encounter something through one of our non-visual senses first. To arrive outside my apartment door and smell something wonderful—to open the door and hear the sounds of sizzling in pots, the clank of silverware; to be instructed to taste a forkful of the pot's contents with my eyes closed—renders a familiar experience new. I only come forth to verify the scene with my eyes: my boyfriend in front of me with dinner in messy preparation around him.
Coming to something through the secondary senses first discombobulates, then introduces a feeling of novelty to the ordinary. As dogs have their own hierarchy of senses, I imagine that they too might feel the mystery of coming at something by means other than their nose. This may explain both the difficulty dogs have in understanding some of our first requests to them (off the