Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [78]
The gold standard experiment for theory of mind is called the false belief test. In this design, the subject, typically a child, is presented with a minidrama played out by puppets. One puppet places a marble in a basket in front of her, in full view of the subject and a second puppet. Then the first puppet leaves the room. Promptly, the second puppet wickedly moves the marble over to her basket. As the first puppet returns, the subject is quizzed: Where will the first puppet go looking for her marble?
By age four, children answer correctly, realizing that they and the puppet know different things. Before that age, though, children surprisingly and unambiguously fail. They say the puppet will look for the marble where the marble actually is—in the second basket—showing that they aren't thinking about what the first puppet really knows.
To design a verbal false belief task for animals, who cannot be expected to communicate their answers (nor be engaged by a puppet marble-switching drama) is nigh impossible, so nonverbal tests have been developed. Many take their cue from anecdotal reports of compellingly mindful animal behavior seen in the wild: of deception or clever competitive strategies. Chimpanzees are the most frequent subjects since, as close relatives to humans, one might expect that they would have the most similar cognitive abilities.
While the results with chimpanzees have been equivocal, lending credibility to the notion that only humans have a fully developed theory of mind, a wrench has been thrown in the experimental works. That wrench is the dog: whose attention to attention, whose seeming mind reading, looks anecdotally just like what we call acting with a theory of mind. To go from my living-room theorizing about a dog's understanding of mind to solid scientific standing, researchers have begun to run dogs on the same tests used with chimps.
THEORY OF DOG MIND
Here's what one dog, an unsuspecting experimental subject, found awaiting him at home one day. Instead of the usual ready availability of his favorite tennis balls, every ball in the house had been collected, and an extra lot of people were standing about gazing at him. Fine so far: Philip, the three-year-old Belgian Tervuren in question, didn't freak out. But he might have been bemused when, one by one, the balls were shown to him and then placed in one of three boxes and locked up. This was new stuff. Whether game or threat, what was clear was that the balls were being methodically placed somewhere other than his favorite place: right in his mouth.
When released by his owner, Philip went, naturally, straight toward the box where he saw a ball hidden, and he nuzzled the box. This turned out to be the right thing to do, for it prompted the humans to exclaim merrily, open the box, and give him the ball. Despite just having his mouth on the ball, the dog found that the people around him kept taking it away and securing it in one or the other box—so he kept playing along. Then they started locking the boxes and putting the key elsewhere, so the whole thing took even longer after he selected the right box: someone must find the key, bring it to the box, and open it. The final twist involved one person who locked the box, hid the key, then left the room. Another person came in—surely one who, like all other people around, would be able to use these key-things to open these lock-things.
This was the moment the experimenters were waiting for: