Week 4: Research and Even More Research

Before starting this weeks research, I thought I was well versed in how to navigate research platforms. After all, I used them during junior and senior year of high school for multiple in-depth research projects. Even during my first quarter at UCSB, I found myself in the weeds of EBSCO and other research outlets.

However, when starting to find this weeks articles it started to feel like I didn’t know how to use this at all. Come to find out, dog cognition and social abilities are more of a niche topic to find in academic articles. So much of the research is saturated with how dogs affect humans and our emotional needs, but I want to focus on the dogs being the protagonist of the story, not dogs helping humans but how can humans better understand and help our furry friends. I needed to go back to other articles I have interacted with and pick up new key words other than ‘cognition in dogs’ or ‘social intelligence in dogs’ since these got me limited and varying results that did not quite fit what I was looking for. But after altering my wording about 20 times and following the breadcrumb path of cited articles, I was able to find a few articles that I liked and felt like had some interest factor to them. Drum role please ….. here is two of those articles!

Hare, Brian, and Michael Tomasello. “Human-like Social Skills in Dogs?” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 9, no. 9, Sept. 2005, pp. 439–444, doi:10.1016/j.tics.2005.07.003.

I found this article using google scholar, this was one of the first articles I found after trial and error of some of my key words, at this point I was annoyed so I searched the word “dogs” and just started scrolling. I found this article in the middle of page two of the results, goes to show you need to just keep scrolling, just keep scrolling (you get it? Like “just keep swimming” from finding Nemo? lol)

One of the interesting articles I found is “Human-like Social Skills in Dogs”. This articles tells readers a lot about how dogs are able to pick up on human behavior and social indicators used by their owners. This article looks at tests such as the pointing tests, where one hides food somewhere and then points to indicate where to find it. Dogs are able to be apart of the conversation with humans now. They have been able to pick up on indicators such as pointing and have evolved to communicate with humans by picking up on human communication having such as body language, tone, and movements.

This article can help us better understand the learning abilities of dogs and how they do and do not communicate with humans. Surprisingly so, the protagonist in this research while it pertained mostly to dogs, a lot of the methods were using dogs in comparison to research done with chimpanzees as this was a comparative study on how the domesticated dogs would act differently.

Pongrácz, Péter, et al. “Interaction between Individual Experience and Social Learning in Dogs.” Animal Behaviour, vol. 65, no. 3, Mar. 2003, pp. 595–603, doi:10.1006/anbe.2003.2079.

This next article I found was using the Academic Search Complete platform. The process of finding this was similar to finding the last article because instead of just searching “Dogs” I used Canis Familiaris (I hope I’m spelling that right).

When I found this article, I then realized that this was one of the articles cited by the article above which is why I saw it fitting to include in this blog post. The article is called “Interaction Between Individual Expereince and Social Learning in Dogs” and primarily looks at how dogs are able to learn from their own observations of humans. The researchers conducted two tests where dogs had to go around a fence to get the treat or “a reward”. In the first test, some dogs could use doors instead of going around the fence, making it the easier route. In the second test, dogs watched a person go around the fence before trying it themselves. They found that dogs learned better from watching others than from their own experiences. They also found that once the dogs learned a certain way, they kept doing it even if there was an easier way. This shows that dogs can learn from others but might stick to what they know even if it's not the best way.

The protagonist in this article was the dogs and their learning abilities based on watching humans. This showed us how they are able to recreate their own observations. I’ve seen this myself with my dog Kirby, once he found out how we opened doors, we had to change the doorknobs so he would stop getting into things. This article builds on dogs learning abilities and how their domestication from his mans has allowed them to replicate or “copy” us.