“Most of what we do must seem really weird to dogs. Trying to get inside our minds would be really useful.”
, like a hidden snack. But are dogs really reading our minds? Or have they just lived with us so long that they’ve simply learned to make an association between, say, a hand and a tasty treat?
“It seems really well done; I think it moves the ball forward,” says Evan MacLean, director of the Arizona Canine Cognition Center at the University of Arizona, who has shown. Still, he says, there could be other explanations besides canine mind reading. Then the mind games began. In one set of experiments, Steinmann held a piece of sausage near the hole, but every time the dog approached, the snack “slipped” out of her fingers, falling back inside the cage. Next up, she again held the treat to the hole, but jerked it away as soon as the dog’s snout got close. In a final test, the team covered the hole; Steinmann tried to push the treat through, but she couldn’t. Each trial lasted about 30 seconds.
The dogs’ tails also gave clues to their mindset. The 3D tracking software showed the animals tended to wag their tails more on the right side of their bodies when the researcher was fumbling. “That’s really intriguing,” MacLean says, as previous research has linked rightward tail movements to positive emotions. “That’s consistent with the idea that the dogs thought the experimenter’s intentions were good.
Still, he says the new study doesn’t conclusively show the dogs were probing human thoughts. They may have just learned from past experience: “When my owner fumbled, I eventually got the treat, so it was worth sticking around,” the dog may have been thinking. “When she teased me, it wasn’t.” No mind reading required.
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