Over the past half-century, the tools of neuroscience have revealed much about the workings of the human brain. Now researchers are pushing forward a new frontier: exploring what goes on in the mind of man’s best friend. The study of “canine cognition” has taken off in recent years, energized by new findings about how dogs learn about words, numbers, abstract concepts—and about how they manage us, their ostensible masters.
Most impressive of all is dogs’ ability to learn about humans.
They respond to our gestures, they attend to our body language, and they follow our gaze to figure out what we’re looking at. They even “catch” human yawns, according to a study published in the journal Biology Letters. As the longest-domesticated species, dogs have evolved alongside humans, selected over thousands of years for traits that make them especially sensitive to our cues. Another study from the journal Science reported that puppies only a few weeks old could read human’s signals, while full-grown wolves raised by humans could not. Dogs read people better than chimpanzees, humans’ closest primate relative, according to research published earlier this year. In fact, the most accurate comparison is to a human child: dogs have the social cognition capacities of a two-year-old.
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