Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [67]
Hans's preternatural sensitivity may have ensued, paradoxically, from other deficits. Since he presumably didn't have any notion about numbers or arithmetic, he was not distracted by those stimuli. By contrast, our attention to the seemingly salient details would lead us to miss the one clear indication of the answer.
An experimental psychologist I've met who does research with pigeons demonstrates this phenomenon when teaching his undergraduate class. He shows the students a series of slides of bar graphs with blue bars of various lengths set against a white background. The slides fall into one of two categories, he says: those that have some unspecified "x-ness" feature, and those that don't. He points out which slides are members of the x-ness category. He then puts it to the students to use the example slides to figure out what the conditions for x-ness are.
After many minutes of frustrated and failing attempts by the students, he reveals that pigeons trained on a set of members with x-ness can without fail tell of a new graph whether it satisfies this elusive criterion or not. The students shift uncomfortably in their seats. Still, not a person comes up with the answer. Finally, their professor fills them in: those slides that are mostly blue are members of the x-ness category; those that are more white are not.
The students are outraged: they've been outsmarted by pigeons. In running this test with my psychology classes, I find they also decry the task. Though no student has ever come up with the answer, they all later complain that the answer is unfair. They were looking for some complicated relationship between the bars—one consistent with the kinds of relationships between features that bar graphs are meant to represent. But there is none. "X-ness" is simply "more blue." Only pigeons, blissfully unaware of bar graphs, saw them for their colors and perceived the true categories.
What dogs do is a version of what Hans and the pigeons did. Anecdotal tales of this kind of phenomenon abound. One trainer of search-and-rescue dogs put his hands on his hips in exasperation when the dog was following the wrong path. Another rubbed his chin uneasily. In both cases, the dogs learned to use the cues of their trainers as information that they were off the trail. (The trainers had to be trained to tone down their cuing.) As we look for the more complex explanation for an event, or for others' behavior, we may overlook clues that dogs see naturally. It is less extrasensory perception than the well-added sum of their ordinary senses. Dogs use their sensory skills in combination with their attention to us. Without their interest in our attention, they would not perceive the subtle differences in our strides and body postures and stress levels as important bits of information. It allows them to predict us and to reveal us.
READING US
The dog observes us, thinks about us, knows us. Do they then have some special knowledge about us, born of their attention to us and to our attention? They do.
In a nonverbal way, dogs know who we are, they know what we do, and they know some things about us unknown to ourselves. We're knowable by look, and even more so by our smells. Over and above that, how we act defines who we are. Part of my recognition of Pump is not just of her visage; it is of her walk: her slightly off-kilter, jaunty trot with her droopy ears bouncing