Inside of a Dog_ What Dogs See, Smell, and Know - Alexandra Horowitz [79]
On repeated trials, that's more or less what the dog did: ever patient, Philip looked toward the spot where the key had been hidden, or headed that way. Note that he didn't actually take it in his mouth and open the box: that'd be some trick, but even the most ardent dog enthusiast will admit it's unlikely. Instead, Philip used his eyes and his body as communications.
Philip's behavior could be interpreted in three ways: one functional, one intentional, one conservative. The functional interpretation is this: the dog's gaze served as information for the person, whether the dog meant it to or not. The intentional: the dog did in fact mean it to: he looked because he knew the person was ignorant of the key's location. The conservative: the dog looked reflexively, since someone was recently over there where the key was.
The data do the interpreting. They show that the functional is definitely true: gaze did serve as information to the person nearby. But the intentional take is also true: the dog looked at the location of the key more often when the person in the room with them was ignorant where it was—as if meaning to inform the person with his gaze. That nixes the conservative interpretation. Philip seemed to be thinking about these crazy experimenters' minds.
This is but one dog—maybe a particularly astute one. Remember the begging experiment run with chimps and dogs? Unlike chimps, all the tested dogs immediately followed the knower's (non-blindfolded or bucketed person's) advice as to which box was baited with food. Hoorah for these dogs, who thus all found food inside. This looks good for the theory of dog mind: they acted as though thinking about the knowledge states of the strange people pointing in front of them. But after this seeming cognitive accomplishment, a strange thing happened. When run again and again on the same test, these dogs changed their strategies. They began to pick the guesser just about as often as the knower. Does this mean they were prescient and then grew dimwitted? Although dogs will do impressive convolutions for food, this doesn't make sense as an explanation. Perhaps it indicates that the first round was a fluke.
The best interpretation is that the dogs' performance on the task makes a methodological point. There may be other cues the dogs are using to make their decisions that are, to them, just as strong as the presence or absence of the guesser is to us. Consider, for instance, that all humans are on the whole highly knowledgeable about the sources of food, from a dog's point of view. We are regularly around food, we smell like food, we open and close a cold box filled with food all day long, and sometimes we even have food dribbling out of our pockets. This is such a well-learned feature of us that it might be hard to overturn on the basis of a few trials one afternoon. This hypothesis is borne out by the fact that the dogs did use the people to make their decision: they never chose a third box, unselected by either the guesser or the knower.
However we interpret the results, though, the dogs are not going out of their way to prove to us that they have a theory of mind. Of course, one of the difficulties of designing experiments for any animal is that, as the procedure grows more complicated in order to test for a very specific skill, it risks becoming an exceedingly strange scenario for the animal. One might suggest that massive confusion on the part of the subjects is not unreasonable. They are often thrust into situations that are bizarre: that are, in fact, intentionally unlike anything they've seen before. People appear with buckets over their heads; trials go on endlessly; it is in every way not normal. Dogs nonetheless sometimes manage to perform well at the tasks in front of them.
Still, their natural