Inside the Canine Mind

Dog cognition research aims to look at behavior of this gregarious species Canis familiaris to understand something about their minds -- especially elements of their psychology analogous to our own. I will describe the arm of our Lab's research which looks at social interactions between dogs and others, such as conspecifics or humans. We examine rough-and-tumble dyadic dog play, a fertile context to consider social behavior, as it is ubiquitous, familiar, and spontaneously occurring. What might seem to be a continuous, unitary behavior is, upon examination, an elaborate dance between play partners. I discuss one way that ethologists have carved play -- intraspecific as well as interspecific -- at its joints, and propose it as a model for a computational approach. I also describe social behavioral tasks from our lab's research into the attributions of emotions that people make to dogs in interaction with them, such as of their "guilt" or "jealousy." I also touch on the relevance of physical processes in these social encounters.