I recently gave a public lecture at the Norman Rockwell Museum, What Dogs Know: A Scientific Guide to Understanding Your Canine Companion. Why did they let a dog nut like me into the museum? Because dogs abound in Rockwell’s canvases.
We look at Rockwell’s painting and think, “Of course a dog would be sleeping on his lap.”
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| http://www.nrm.org/ |
“Of course a dog would join the family in looking out the window”
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| http://www.nrm.org/ |
(and while the dog might not necessarily attach the same importance to the new Plymouth, he/she is certainly excited to participate in the excitement and join the family activity of looking out the window).
Rockwell captures how dogs seem to effortlessly join our activities, and I presented the science, not just the nostalgia, behind this relationship.
Public lectures remind me that in addition to (hopefully) listening to what I’m saying, people are comparing my words and information with their personal experiences of dogs.
“Yes! Banjo does that all the time! That’s so funny!” or “Fido never does that. This woman is crazy.”
And they would both be right (Except for the crazy bit. (No, even the crazy bit)).
The reason they would both be right is that canine behavioral researchers never say, “Every dog does (fill in the blank) every time.” In fact, researchers would never say that because that would make them liars.
For example, the below graph* shows how different species follow a human’s pointing gesture to a target location (the white and black bars represent different types of pointing gestures). Even though the graphs show the mean, you can see that no species follows the pointing gesture to the target location 100% of the time. That’s okay! What excites researchers is that these species follow the gesture above chance (which is the horizontal line at 50%).
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| http://familydogproject.elte.hu/Pdf/publikaciok/2006/miklosiS2006.pdf |
Since we don’t find 100% compliance on the group level, you
would expect that individuals don’t perform at 100% either. In an earlier post, I described a study finding that dogs from cooperative worker breeds follow a human’s pointing gesture better than mutts or dogs bred to work independently**. And on a group level, that’s true. But individual variation within the groups is also true.
In that study, dogs saw 20 pointing gestures toward one of two bowls. If dogs went to the correct bowl, they received a treat, wrong bowl, no treat. The below graph shows a subset of the dog subjects.
You can see that on the group level, cooperative workers (on the right) followed the point and made the correct choice more often than independent workers (on the left). But on the individual level, Komondor #3 (on the left) did pretty well! In fact, Komondor #3 even out performed Border Collie #2 (on the right), a member of the more successful cooperative worker group.
When studies report differences at the group level, we most definitely will find individual variation within those groups.
To put it on our terms, like me, you are an individual. But we can also be placed into various groups. For example, I am part of a group of females with brown hair, straight top teeth who graduated from UW-Madison. If I were standing in a room of women, all members of this group, we would certainly find similarities and differences. In fact, some of us might even not like dogs.
References
* Miklósi, Á., Soproni, K. 2006. A comparative analysis of animals' understanding of the human pointing gesture. Animal Cognition, 9: 81-93.
** Gácsi, McGreevy, Kara and Ádám Miklósi, 2009. Effects of selection for cooperation and attention in dogs. Behavioral and Brain Functions
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