Brian Hare and his wife and collaborator Vanessa Woods have written a book on dog cognition, The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think and Hare talks about his book and Dognition project here:
Is your dog a genius or a dolt? Probably both, according to biological anthropologist Brian Hare of Duke University.
Dogs are astoundingly good at reading our gestures and learning words, but they totally fail at physics, Hare says. He’s not talking string theory. Most dogs are at a loss, for example, when their leash gets wound around a tree. Today Hare is launching a new company called Dognition that will, for a fee, analyze the cognitive strengths and weaknesses of your own beloved pooch.
Wired: What do dogs do that’s smart?
Hare: Science has ignored dogs and the book highlights why that’s changing. We’ve discovered what makes them remarkable, and it’s very similar to what develops in kids that makes them remarkable. It’s that kids start using gestures and learning words in a way that other species don’t. The fact that dogs share this remarkable ability that we think is so important to being human is what got people (researchers) really fascinated.
Wired: In what ways are they dumb?
Hare: They’re incredibly vapid when it comes to understanding the physical world, things like understanding that if you’re connected to somebody with a leash you can’t go on the other side of the lamppost. There’s good evidence that that really is a cognitive constraint. They just don’t get it.
Wired: Why do you think studying dogs can tell us something about our own evolution?
Hare: Cognition doesn’t fossilize. We have this wonderful fossil assemblage of the hominid lineage, but we don’t have any way to test the behavior of baby Neanderthals and Homo erectus, which is what I’d really love to do. Within the constraints of what their brains are capable of, dogs have converged with us in terms of their social skills. We’re trying to make the argument that if selection against aggression could lead to more social skills in dogs, well the same thing could have happened in our species.
Is your dog a genius or a dolt? Probably both, according to biological anthropologist Brian Hare of Duke University.
Dogs are astoundingly good at reading our gestures and learning words, but they totally fail at physics, Hare says. He’s not talking string theory. Most dogs are at a loss, for example, when their leash gets wound around a tree. Today Hare is launching a new company called Dognition that will, for a fee, analyze the cognitive strengths and weaknesses of your own beloved pooch.
Wired: What do dogs do that’s smart?
Hare: Science has ignored dogs and the book highlights why that’s changing. We’ve discovered what makes them remarkable, and it’s very similar to what develops in kids that makes them remarkable. It’s that kids start using gestures and learning words in a way that other species don’t. The fact that dogs share this remarkable ability that we think is so important to being human is what got people (researchers) really fascinated.
Wired: In what ways are they dumb?
Hare: They’re incredibly vapid when it comes to understanding the physical world, things like understanding that if you’re connected to somebody with a leash you can’t go on the other side of the lamppost. There’s good evidence that that really is a cognitive constraint. They just don’t get it.
Wired: Why do you think studying dogs can tell us something about our own evolution?
Hare: Cognition doesn’t fossilize. We have this wonderful fossil assemblage of the hominid lineage, but we don’t have any way to test the behavior of baby Neanderthals and Homo erectus, which is what I’d really love to do. Within the constraints of what their brains are capable of, dogs have converged with us in terms of their social skills. We’re trying to make the argument that if selection against aggression could lead to more social skills in dogs, well the same thing could have happened in our species.
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