Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [76]
Instead it had something to do with understanding others' actions. Simply watching someone quietly walk around the fence was insufficient to get the dogs to follow the person's route: the person had to be calling the dog's name, grabbing attention, yammering away. Watching another dog who had been trained to retrieve the reward by the left-hand route also prompted observing dogs to go left.
This result showed that dogs can see others' behavior as a demonstration of how to get to a goal. But we know from experience with our dogs that not every relevant behavior we do is seen as a "demonstration." Pump may watch me navigate around strewn chairs, books, and clothes piles as I head to the kitchen, but she will herself charge right through piles to take the quickest route. Other tests are necessary to determine if dogs are truly putting themselves in our shoes, and not just prone to follow that human, wherever we go.
Two experiments have tested just this imitative understanding. The first asked what exactly dogs see in others' behavior: the means or the end. A good imitator would see both, but would also see if the particular means isn't the most expedient way to the end. From a young age, human infants can do just that. They will religiously imitate—sometimes to a fault*
—but they can also be astute. For instance, in one classic experiment, after watching an adult turn on a light in an unusual way—with his head—the infant subjects could imitate this novel action, if asked to do so. But they did not spontaneously imitate if the adult was grasping something in his hands, making him unable to use them to turn on the light: the infants used their hands, reasonably enough. If the adult held nothing in his hands, infants were more likely to turn on the light with their heads, too—inferring, perhaps, that there must be good reason, besides one's hands being full, for this new maneuver. They seemed to realize that the adult's actions could be imitated, and they selectively imitated them only insofar as it seemed necessary to do so.
In the dog variation on this paradigm, a wooden rod taking the place of a light, one "demonstrator" dog was taught to press the rod with his paw to release a treat from a spring-loaded dispenser. The researchers then had the demonstrator dog perform his newfound trick in front of other dogs who were being restrained to watch. In one trial the demonstrator pressed the rod while holding a ball in his mouth; in the other, he had no ball. Finally, the observer dogs were let at the apparatus.
It should be noted that dogs are not naturally drawn to mechanical dispensers, even ones with wooden rods. And pressing is not the first approach of most dogs when facing a problem: dogs can use their paws handily, but they typically go at the world mouth first and paws second. Though they can be trained to push or press an object, dogs' first approach at an object such as this one is not one of intuitive understanding. They will bump it, mouth it, knock into it. If they can, they will push it over, dig at it, jump on it. But they do not consider the scene for a moment and then calmly press the rod. Thus the first approach of the observer dogs was particularly interesting: Would the demonstration change their behavior?
These dog subjects behaved just like the human infants with the light switches: The group that saw the demonstration with no ball imitated faithfully, pressing the rod to release the treat. The group that saw the demonstrator acting while holding a ball in his mouth also learned how to get the treat, but used their (ball-less) mouths instead of paws.
That the dogs so imitated is remarkable. This is no mere mimicry, copying for copying's sake. Nor is it just an attraction to the source of activity. It looks more like the behavior of an animal who is considering what another animal is doing: what his intention is, and how—or how much—to reproduce that behavior themselves, if they have the same intent.
If these experiments represent