Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [58]
But what distinguishes dogs from other mammals, even other domesticated mammals, is the way that their attention overlaps with ours. Like us, they pay attention to humans: to our location, subtle movements, moods, and, most avidly, to our faces. A popular conception of animals is that if they look at us at all, it is from fear or appetite, monitoring us as possible predator or prey. Not true: the dog looks very particularly at humans.
Just how particularly is the subject of a mad rush of contemporary research into dog cognitive abilities. This research uses as markers the landmarks in the development of human infants into human adults, which is well documented, and which result is obvious: by adulthood, we all understand what it means to pay attention. What the dog research is revealing is that dogs have some of the same abilities that we do.
THE EYES OF A CHILD
For dogs and humans both, it all begins with a few innate behavioral tendencies. Having and understanding attention is not automatic, but it develops naturally from these instincts. Human infants, like most animals, have a basic orienting reflex: move, as best or as much as you can, toward a source of warmth, food, or safety. Newborns turn their faces toward warmth and suck: the rooting reflex. At that age, infants can do little more. Ducklings, more precocious, relentlessly chase after the first adult creature they see.* In both ducklings and humanlings, this reflex relies on an early perceptual ability: having at least noticed the presence of others. It is an ability that helps us, in our first few years, learn about the important fact of others' attention.
For humans, there is a reliable course of development through infancy of certain behaviors associated with this growing understanding of other people. It is all about learning to attend to the right—human—things in the world, and beginning to understand that others are attending, too. And it begins as soon as they open their eyes. Newborn babies can see, although not much. They are incredibly nearsighted: peering, cooing faces brought just inches from their own may be clear, but that is about the extent of clarity of the world. One of the first things infants notice is any faces nearby. In fact our brains have specialized neurons that fire when we see a face. Infants can detect, and prefer to look at, a face or something facelike—even three points forming a V—rather than other visual scenes. From early in their lives, infants stare longer* at that which interests them, the mother's face being among the first items of interest. Soon infants also learn to distinguish a face looking toward them from one looking away. This is a simple skill, but not a trivial one: out of the visual cacophony of the world, they must start noticing that there are objects, that some of those objects are alive, that some of those alive objects are of particular interest, and that some of those interesting live objects attend to you when they face you.
Once that is established, and their own visual acuity improves, infants focus on the details in that face. They delight at peekaboo: a game playing simply with the importance of eyes. As psychologists have shown by sticking out their tongues and making faces at infants, very young infants can imitate simple expressions. Of course, these expressions don't have the meaning that they will later (we must assume that the infant is not actually sticking his tongue out spitefully at the psychologist, though one might wish it so). Infants are simply learning to use their facial muscles. By three months, they've got it, and they start reacting to others by making faces and smiling socially. They move their heads to look at other faces nearby. By nine months old they are tracking other people's gaze and seeing where it lands. They might use that gaze to find some object that