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Communicative Intentions, Part 1

Course video 17 of 48

In this module, Dr. Hare describes how dogs are cognitively remarkable. He begins by explaining theory of mind, which, when viewed through the ecological approach, suggests that social problem solving drove primate and human cognitive evolution. Next, he describes how good dogs are at understanding communicative intentions, especially compared to apes. Dr. Hare has three hypotheses to explain the remarkable communication found in domestic dogs.

Dog Emotion and Cognition will introduce you to the exciting new study of dog psychology, what the latest discoveries tell us about how dogs think and feel about us, and how we can use this new knowledge to further strengthen our relationship with our best friends.

Skills You'll Learn

Cognitive Science, Evolution, Animal Behavior, Dog

Taught By

Brian Hare
Associate Professor

Transcript

Okay, so this lecture is all about communicative intentions.

In the last lecture we talked about theory of mind and how humans may be special for

their ability to actually understand what others are thinking.

We can really gauge what people perceive, what they believe,

what they intend, even what they feel by using social cues.

For instance, the direction they're looking or how they gesture to us,

to understand what's going on inside their mind.

Well, what we talked about was that it may be that humans are unique.

And that was what was thought, was that really only humans have this ability

to think about the thoughts of others.

And that was largely because of work with great apes and

great apes not showing skills, especially in cooperating and communicating,

to find things that they were searching for using gestures, these social cues.

Also, we're comparing bonobos and chimpanzees to

the development of humans and us finding that humans develop social skills

incredibly rapidly relative to our closest ape relatives.

So, that's where dogs play a big roll, is the big surprise to come,

is that dogs may be really good at reading our communicative intentions.

So for this lecture, Chapter 3 is gonna be the most important for you to read.

That's where everything I talk about in this lecture is detailed.

The story of how this set of discoveries was made about dogs

understanding people's communicative Intentions potentially.

And then also for Dognition finally, there is a game very relevant to this.

Some of the exact games that we're gonna talk about in this lecture are what you

can play with your dog at home.

So this is where Dognition is gonna be a great lab, and

actually the communication games are available at Dognition.com\Mook for free.

You have to play the empathy games first, then the communication games,

which is fine.

But if you play the communication games after the empathy games,

you'll really appreciate what I'm talking about today, in your own dog.

We talked about human children being really good at reading social cues, and

potentially understanding the communicative intentions of others.

And I showed you this slide showing a child attending as

someone's looking at one of two locations or pointing at one of two locations.

And what was found is that kids when you do this,

they actually go to the place you're looking.

They go to the place that you're pointing to.

And that's not what great apes do.

So the reason that that was thought to be so

important is because kids were really flexibly doing this.

They were doing, they were able to read lots of different social cues, and

even social cues they had never seen before spontaneously.

They didn't have to be, you don't have to train children to do this.

Once they reach about 14 to 18 months of age,

they just sort of spontaneously start showing these abilities.

And I have actually a 20 month old at home right now and

I can assure you that this is something that he just started to do.

So, that's very different from the chimpanzees who could learn to solve this

problem but when you gave them a slightly different problem they feel apart and

it seems like they were sort of using some simple strategies.

Like paying attention to my motion, sorry not my motion,

but the people's motion who made the gestures.

So if you move your arm, it sort of attracted their attention and they looked

in that direction and they slowly learned that that was a good place to go search.

But then when you change the situation just a little it,

maybe instead of pointing, you stand in front of the correct location,

they didn't know what you were trying to communicate there.

So that's inflexible and

that's why we think that humans understand communicative intentions.

Because that flexibility is allowed for

by the fact that they can think about somebody else.

Okay, that behavior must be driven by something internal in the other person,

and it must be their intention.

Whereas, if you're slowly learning things and showing inflexibility in this context,

probably you're not thinking about someone else's intentions, you're just reasoning

about, or not even reasoning, you're just learning some basic rules.

That was the status of where this research was until this guy.

And how I ended up, as somebody interested in human evolution,

studying dogs was as a result of my childhood dog, Oreo.

This is Oreo here.

He was a black labrador and just like any labrador retriever,

he was obsessed with fetch.

And you can see in this photo that he has two tennis balls in his mouth.

That's actually really crucial to the discovery.

This is one of the funny things where animals that have these idiosyncratic

habits or preferences can be really important to making discoveries.

So he just happened to really like to play fetch with two tennis balls.

He wasn't happy if he only had one tennis ball.

He had to have two.

And that's really important because what happened and what I had observed as a kid

was if I threw one tennis ball, well he left one tennis ball behind to go find

the first tennis ball but then I would throw the second one while he was gone.

Of course, he didn't know where it was at that point.

And then, when he brought the first one back, he would look at me and

start to bark.

And what he wanted me to do was to gesture and point to where I'd thrown the ball.

Now many of you have dogs and you've seen this in your own dogs, so

this isn't a surprise to you.

But if you know where the research was,

before we started studying dogs on this topic,

this was a big surprise to scientists who thought that understanding gestures in

a flexible way was really unique and special about human development.

So my dog was using my gestures like many dogs do and I had remembered

that obviously and experienced that during my entire childhood.

And so I was having a conversation with my advisor, a great scientist,

Mike Tomasello, and he was one of the main proponents of the idea that maybe

animals can't think about the thoughts of others in any context whatsoever and

that really is totally unique to humans.

And I thought the evidence seemed pretty solid

except I said to him one day when he was explaining to me, just like I did to you,

about humans using gestures as they develop versus chimpanzees and bonobos.

I said well I think my dog can do that.

And he looked at me kind of funny and

he said, oh come on, your dog can't, everybody's dog does calculus.

And I said no, no, no, really.

And I told him the story about Oreo and he said, huh, well,

you seem really convinced.

And I said yeah, come on, I mean this is my dog, my best friend growing up,

I know what I'm talking about here.

[LAUGH] And he said okay, all right, all right.

So he was a great scientist, and this is where I learned what science is.

Science is not about having a lot of knowledge and knowing everything.

In fact, science is about being willing to test your ideas and

find out that you might be wrong.

And so, being a great scientist, he said, let's test it.

And he helped me come up with a way to test whether Oreo

was really using gestures the way that I was saying that he was.

And then it ended up we did a series of experiments to look at whether Oreo

used gestures like human children.

It ended up that my brother had a dog at the same time,

named Daisy, and she lived in the backyard with Oreo.

So we did our first set of studies on my two pet dogs in my parents'

garage at home in Atlanta.

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