14 DAY TRIAL // A new scientific study finds that, in spite of having lived close to humans for the last several tens of millennia, dogs are utterly unable to read a person's mind. The recent experiments focused on the behavior of dogs, which proved that they still trusted unreliable people. The finds again hammer down the so-called canine “theory of mind,” which was originally meant to be an equivalent to the human one, which can more easily be evidenced, ScienceNow informs.
If scientists ask a small child, for instance, if their mother knows where they hid a toy, they will answer “yes,” because, at a small age, they believe their mother knows everything they know. As kids grow up, they begin to realize that, in fact, parents can only know what they see, in very much the same way they do. And so, before the age of seven, the child will answer the scientists' question by saying “No, my mom does not know where the toy is.” This is the essence of the human “theory of mind.” Experts have been trying to apply the same principles to animals as well, but that has proven to be very difficult.
Back in the late 1970s, some researchers claimed that they had managed to obtain some sort of proof of this in chimpanzee studies, but work conducted by peers demonstrated less conclusive results. Expert Alexandra Horowitz, from the Barnard College in New York City, has more recently suggested that dogs have a “theory of mind” towards other dogs. She bases her claims on canine behavior, in which a dog will wait until it has the attention of other dogs before playing with them. Additionally, if a play mate stops paying attention, the first dog would nip or bite it, to regain it.
In the latest experiments, scientists assigned 24 dogs of various breeds to deceptive and trustworthy individuals. In a park, the animals were placed near a tree, while, at some distance away, two buckets were brought in. One contained food and the other did not. The deceptive humans pointed at the empty bucket when calling their dog, while the trustworthy ones always pointed at the full bucket. Dogs assigned to helpful humans obeyed them 78 to 96 percent of the time, with unwaivering faith. The dogs appointed to deceiving researchers showed a decline in faith over some 225 trials, to 53 to 60 percent.
Other similar experiments were conducted by the same team, but this time replacing humans, as the fear existed that dogs began to associate them with a lack or presence of food, respectively. It could not be established sufficiently firmly that dogs could read their handlers' minds, but only that they managed to learn a Pavlov type of reflex. Some critics argue, however, that the new study does “not take into account (...) the social world of the species,” believing that dogs reared near humans may subordinate their food-searching instinct to their faith to the master.