Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [57]
Dogs are closer to those cows than to us. Humans quickly label and categorize a scene. Walking to work along a Manhattan street, the typical commuter is perfectly oblivious to the world he is passing. He notices neither beggars nor celebrities; startles neither to ambulances or parades; simply sidesteps a crowd gathered to gape at … well, whatever it is crowds gape at: I rarely stop to see. On most mornings, the route is reduced to its landmarks; nothing else needs attending to. There is good reason to believe that this is not how dogs think. The walk to the park becomes familiar over time, but they don't stop looking. They are much more struck by what they actually see, the immediate details, than what they expect to see.
Given how dogs see, how do they apply their visual ability? Cleverly: they look at us. Once a dog has opened up his eyes to us, a remarkable thing happens. He starts gazing at us. Dogs see us, but the differences in their vision also seem to allow them to see things about us that even we do not see. Soon it seems they are looking straight into our minds.
Seen by a Dog
I am startled and a little flustered to look up from my work and see Pump watching me, her eyes trained on mine. There is a powerful pull to a dog who looks you in the eyes. I am on her radar: it feels that she is looking not just at me, but to—and into—me.
Look a dog in the eyes and you get the definite feeling that he is looking back. Dogs return our gaze. Their look is more than just setting eyes on us; they are looking at us in the same way that we look at them. The importance of the dog's gaze, when it is directed at our faces, is that gaze implies a frame of mind. It implies attention. A gazer is both paying attention to you and, possibly, paying attention to your own attention.
At its most basic level, attention is a process of bringing forward some aspects of all the stimuli bombarding an individual in a moment. Visual attention begins with looking; auditory attention with hearing: both are possible for all animals with eyes and ears. Just having the sensory apparatuses isn't sufficient to do what we generally mean by paying attention, though: considering what it is one has turned to look or hear.
When invoked by psychologists, attention is treated not just as turning the head toward a stimulus, but as something else in addition: a state of mind that indicates interest, intent. In attending to someone else's head turns, one may be demonstrating an understanding of the psychological states of other people—a distinctively human skill. We attend to others' attention because it helps to predict what that someone other will do next, or what he can see and what he might know. One of the deficits that many people with autism have is an inability, or lack of inclination, to look at other people's eyes. As a result, they aren't instinctively able to understand when other people are paying attention—or how to manipulate others' attention.
The simple ability to focus on some things while ignoring others is crucial for any animal: objects one sees, smells, or hears may be more or less relevant for survival. Attend to those that are relevant; ignore the rest of the visual landscape or the confusion of sounds. Even with survival no longer our most pressing concern, humans are constantly trying to direct, divert, or attract attention. Some attention mechanism is required to do all the ordinary things of our days: to listen to someone talking to us, to plan a walking route to work, even to remember what one was thinking a moment ago.
Dogs, social animals like us, and also more or less relieved of survival pressures, surely have some interesting mechanisms with which to attend to the world. By virtue of their different sensory abilities, though, they