|
Buffy is having a good day. Just four years old, she isn't shy around strangers. She shows the energy of a wind-up toy, bumping into chairs with abandon, and the inquisitiveness of an alien dropped into a strange environment, sniffing out the scene in one end of the room and then the other. Originally from sun-speckled Hawaii, she's more at home outdoors than here in the sub-basement of Duke's Biological Sciences Building. In fact, she's an avid walker. She is strong-willed and independent; as young as she is, she enjoys taking the leading role at home.
Buffy, whose distinguishing characteristic is a thick, shaggy, glistening white coat, is a sixty-five-pound mixed-breed "Hawaiian sled dog," as her owner, Cheryl Miller, describes her—some Samoyed, some German shepherd, and some indeterminate other influences. She is playing in what is likely the only Duke lab stocked with boxes of Bow Wow Bites and Fido's Favorites, a Spill-less Smart Bowl, Bouncy Bone dog toys, and a stylized "Dog Xing" sign.
This is the Duke Canine Cognition Center, newly created by Brian Hare, a dogged (truly) assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology. He regularly tells visitors, "We have the cheapest tuition and the best acceptance rate at Duke." For each study the lab runs, researchers will test between thirty and fifty dogs; some 550 dogs are in its database. "We've sort of jokingly named the first experiment, 'Does your dog love you more than a stranger?' Really the experiment is all about trust," Hare says. "It's trust or tolerance that's at the core of almost everything we do."
For an hour on this November afternoon, Buffy is completing a food-finding task presented under various conditions. First she's tested to see whether she grabs for tasty treats placed in front of her owner, in front of an experimenter, or at some remove from both. Next she's tested to gauge her understanding of a very basic concept: A green plastic cup is placed over the treat, obscuring it from view; will she realize the treat is still to be found? She gets it—that is, she consistently pushes the cup with her snout in search of her edible objective. "No problem for her. She's 100 percent," says a lab researcher.
From there it gets harder. Two cups are put on the floor; an experimenter may supply one or both, surreptitiously, with the treat. Sometimes the owner points to the one treat-bearing cup. Sometimes an assistant, a "stranger" to Buffy, does. And sometimes, when both cups are provided with the treats, both the owner and the stranger are pointing, one to the left, one to the right. How will the treat-seeking Buffy—deprived of any verbal signals or eye contact—respond to the pointing of her owner versus that of a stranger?
A dog can have a short-term side bias. That is, Buffy might ignore the pointing and favor one side of the room over the other, if that side seems to be producing tasty rewards. So the researchers introduce frequent breaks to, essentially, get the bias out of Buffy's mind.
The casual, non-canine observer might figure that Buffy could simply sniff out the treat. But lab director Kara Schroepfer points out that there are enough residual smells in the room—including those left by previous dog subjects—to confuse a dog in search of a particular telltale smell. Schroepfer says the lab uses a sophisticated videotaping system. Cameras, placed around the ceiling of the room, capture multiple angles, making it easy to see where Buffy looked first and showing whether the experimenters made any mistakes in prompting Buffy.
"I thought my dog was pretty smart," says Miller after the session. "I wanted to validate that." At home, Buffy is very adept at finding hidden treats, Miller adds. She was curious to see how that knack might be expressed in a lab setting.
Hare adapts well to multiple settings, including the classroom. On a dreary November morning, he's firing up his students in "Human Cognitive Evolution" with a reference to Ferris Bueller's Day Off—though he's at a different end of the evolutionary spectrum from the movie's teacher, the monotonic Ben Stein. Lecturing on mating strategies and the evolution of mate preferences, he mentions a survey of Playboy pinups that highlighted a constant standard of female beauty; the survey pointed to a particular ratio between hip and waist radius. He shows images of Madonna and Denzel Washington to demonstrate the innate appeal of the "incredible symmetry in their facial features." And he explains why females seem to be attracted to men with symmetrical faces that are like their father's face. "That's seriously spooky, and I'm sure Freud would be thrilled at this finding," he tells the students.
At a lecture for graduate students and departmental colleagues—given in a seminar room where coffee, donuts, and bagels are set out alongside early-human skulls and jawbones—he good-naturedly contends with constant technical glitches afflicting his PowerPoint presentation. He wryly encourages the asking of informed questions before he's offered any scientific speculations, imagines a dialogue between a dominant and a submissive chimpanzee competing for food, celebrates the fact that his data appear so small on the projected screen that they can't be contested, describes with mock affection being confined to three acres on an island research station for three months, and shouts out congratulations to Sesame Street on its fortieth anniversary.
While Hare may be adept at creating good feelings, the same is true for his canine subjects. From earlier studies, researchers know that "if you have a stranger play with a dog for twenty minutes, they have—the dog and the human—a reduction in cortisol, a spike in oxytocin, a spike in norepinephrine, and a spike in prolactin," he says. "All those neurotransmitters are things that are involved in making you feel less anxious, very happy, and very social. Cortisol is a stress hormone, and if you have very high levels, it means something is negatively arousing you. So interacting with a dog makes you feel really good. And it makes the dog feel really good."
"Dogs love us," Hare says. "They're obsessed with humans. They're fascinated with us, and they've been bred to be so. It's a little bit artificial for me to have a social interaction with a chimpanzee and make conclusions about its social cognition. With a dog, the best social stimulus you can have is a human."
But humans haven't necessarily been adept at understanding dogs, a phenomenon that presents a scientific opportunity. "Where dogs have been selected to be obsessed with humans, humans have not been selected to be obsessed with dogs," he says. "When I'm with my dog, he's watching me constantly. He wants to be in the same room. He wants to know where I'm going, he wants to know what I'm doing, he wants to know what I'm touching. I'm not watching him that way. That means I miss a lot of stuff that he's doing."
That human-canine dynamic suggests we're too quick to interpret dog behavior in terms of human behavior. A dog's view of the world, though, isn't our view. Imagine your dog, fresh from shredding your living-room couch or gulping down the entire cake on the dining-room table. He goes slinking off with his lowered tail. Is he feeling guilt? It's more likely, Hare says, that he's feeling anxiety as a result of your threatening posture.
Hare had an early dog obsession. Oreo, a black labrador, was his first dog. "He was my best friend growing up. It was a 'Mary had a little lamb' story: Anywhere I went, Oreo went, too—short of school, of course. We hung out all the time."
article continues on page two. |
