Dog Emotion and Cognition

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This week I did something I've never done before.

I did a whole MOOC (massive open on-line class) in three days.  I'm kind of surprised to be saying it was a Coursera class -- I have found them, in general, to be much denser than, say, classes on FutureLearn, which have been interesting, but much lighter in weight than classes on Coursera or edX.


Dog Emotion and Cognition is probably misnamed -- very little emotion was discussed, and the course is probably more about cognition in general than about canine cognition in particular.  Nevertheless, it is a very interesting class. 

I learned things about dogs, and wolves, and chimps, and bonobos, and humans that I didn't know before the class.  If you love dogs, I bet you would like the class.

One of the things they discuss is the way humans are hard-wired to understand that other humans are trying to help them with a task.  If you gaze at the location of a hidden treat (or point at it), humans over the age of about 14 months know you are telling them where the treat is.  You don't have to teach them.  They just know it.

The other great apes can be taught what we mean by pointing, after many trials (with many rewards), but they do not generalize from pointing to automatically understanding we mean the same thing by gazing.  Humans (even young children) will learn immediately that if you place a block by the hidden food, you are telling them where to look.  Apes, again have to be laboriously trained, even if they have already been taught what we mean by pointing.

Guess who, besides us, understands pointing/gazing as informative?  Yep, dogs.  Anyone with a dog probably knows this, but it's now been scientifically studied.  Dogs are great at understanding humans pointing at stuff.  Wolves totally do not get it, but dogs....  Dogs know what we mean.

Some dogs even use signals for getting us to look at something (and DO something).  One of our dogs would sit on the floor right under a Cheerios box on the counter.  She would stare at us, grinning, until we noticed her, and then she'd meaningfully stare at the box, and then back at us.  I thought it was so cute, and so smart, that I always gave her a few Cheerios......

I never taught her that.  She taught me...................  :-)

Not all dogs will give this sort of signal to humans, but some do.  We heard about this in class, too.


Dog Emotion and Cognition is all videos, with maybe a few paragraphs here and there to read, and the quizzes and final were very easy.  I successfully completed all the work for the class, but will, alas, get no certificate of completion (because I would have to pay $49, which I think is really a lot, for a certificate suitable for sticking to the fridge with magnets...........).


One of the cool things we learned about in the class is Dognition.  The instructor for Dog Emotion and Cognition, along with some of his colleagues, have created this Citizen Science site.  You and your dog(s) can have fun and contribute to science.

They have developed a set of short experiments (they call them games) that you can do with your dog(s).  They are intended to test each dog's level of empathy, memory, reasoning, cunning, and communication.  If you play all of the games, and enter all of your data, your dog will be added to the dataset.

The more dogs in the dataset, the more subtle the questions that dataset can answer (more subjects = more "power").

If I had a dog, I would totally be doing this.  How cool to learn more about your own dog's cognitive style (and its ramifications for working with that dog), and how cool to add strength to what is known about dogs!


I am finding that more and more MOOCs are including info about chances to participate in Citizen Science, from participating in a within-the-class memory experiment to learning more about your gut microbiome, and adding it to the American Gut database. 

What a good use of all those thousands of MOOC students -- if you can get them to participate in your experiments (especially if you can get them to pay for the privilege, as they do if you want to be part of the American Gut project)! 

(By the way, I think your dog can also participate in the American Gut Project..........)

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