Monday, June 13, 2011

Can dogs read our mind?


Can dogs read our minds? How do I learn to order food or decide to misbehave when they do not look? According to Monique Udell and her team at the University of Florida (USA), the way dogs respond to the level of attention paid people tells us something about the way they think and learn about human behavior.

Recent research has identified a wide range of social behaviors similar to humans in the domestic dog, including its ability to respond to body language of people around him, to verbal commands, and states of attention. But how? Do you see your behavior in different circumstances and then respond accordingly? Or learn from experience, responding to what happens around them?

To find out, Udell and her colleagues launched two experiments to compare how they act domestic dogs, sheepdogs and wolves giving them the opportunity to order food, whether a person or a person to alert the animal can not see. So for the first time found that wolves are able to claim humans approaching food alert. This shows that both kinds - domestic and non domestic - have the ability to behave according to the state of attention of a human being. In addition, both wolves and dogs were able to quickly improve performance with practice.

Also reached the conclusion that dogs living in a home environment are more sensitive to predictable stimuli in humans attentive than pastoralists. Dog behavior, they conclude, "is due to the willingness of animals to accept humans as social peers, combined with an ability to track the movements and actions of individuals to receive confirmation. "