Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [64]
Dogs also approach the blindfolded persons warily—as befits the situation, if one isn't let in on the fact of being a subject in an experiment. These experiments using unresponsive, oddly outfitted characters are typical of psychological tests. At some level, they are useful in order to avoid the possibility that the subject has had experience with the setting they are about to encounter. In other words, the tests aim to get at what the dogs intuitively understand about the knowledge states of the human, not what the dog might have learned about what to do when you see someone who is blindfolded. Still, the dog is confronted with what must be a strange couple of hours.
Variations of the begging trials were first run with chimpanzees. In that context, the attentional state of the human was taken to indicate something about her knowledge. Someone who sees food baited in one of two hidden bins is "knowledgeable"; someone who stands idly by in the same room, but has a bucket over her head, is not. Did the chimps then beg to the knowledgeable person or to the one who is guessing at the location of the food (by chance guessing correctly once in a while)? Over time, chimps learn to beg to the knowledgeable informant—but only when the guesser has been out of the room, or has her back turned when the bin is baited. When the guesser simply has her eyes blocked—with a bucket, paper bag, or blindfold—the chimps begged to her, too.
Dogs have gone through trials with odd humans wearing buckets, blindfolds, or holding books in front of their eyes, blocking their vision. They outperform chimps: dogs preferentially beg to the looking—to those whose eyes they can see. This is just how we act, preferring to talk, cajole, invite, or solicit those whose eyes are visible. Eyes equal attention equals knowledge.
Best, dogs use this knowledge for manipulative ends. Researchers have found that dogs not only understand when we are attentive, but are sensitive to what they can get away with at different levels of their owners' attention. In one experiment, after being instructed to lie down (and dutifully so doing), dogs were observed in three trials. In the first condition, an owner stood and stared at her dog. The result? The dog stayed lying down: perfectly obedient. In the second condition, the owner proceeded to sit down and watch television: here the dog paused, but shortly disobeyed and got up. And in the third condition, the owner didn't just ignore the dog but left the room entirely, leaving the dog alone with his owner's command still echoing in his ears.
Apparently the echo was not long-lasting, for in these trials the dogs were quickest and likeliest to disobey the same command so well heeded when the owner was around. What is surprising is not that the dogs disobeyed when the owner left. It is, instead, that dogs do what two-year-olds, chimps, monkeys, and no other animals seem to do: simply notice exactly how attentive someone is, and vary their own behavior accordingly. The dogs methodically used the level of their owners' attention to determine under what circumstances they were free to break the owners' rules—just as they used the information from other dogs to get attention back toward them in play.
The dogs' attention-reading is highly contextual, however. When the same experiment was run using food, that great motivator to perform at their best, the threshold to disobedience was lowered: dogs disobeyed more quickly, and at lower levels of owner distraction. When the owner's attention was harder to gauge—when she was talking with someone else, or sitting quietly with closed eyes—the dogs' behavior was mixed. Some sat patiently, but, seemingly