Zachary Silver, Occidental College – Understanding Canine Perception of Human Behaviors

On Occidental College Week: We see our dogs as good pets, but how do they see us?

Zachary Silver, assistant professor of psychology, looks for an answer.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Zachary Silver has a B.A. in psychology and music from Illinois Wesleyan and a pair of master’s degrees and a Ph.D. in psychology from Yale. As a researcher at the Canine Cognition Center at Yale, he studied how animals learn from and about humans. His research has been featured in both academic and mainstream media.

Understanding Canine Perception of Human Behaviors

For thousands of years, they’ve lived alongside us, cooperated with us, and enriched our lives in many ways, yet the minds of our canine companions are often misunderstood. 

How much do dogs really understand about the world around them? 

During dogs’ domestication history, humans shaped not just the physical appearance of dogs but also their minds. Over numerous generations, dogs became incrementally more attuned to the subtleties of human communication and behavior. The modern domestic dog displays human-like patterns of thinking and reasoning about many social phenomena.

My research seeks to understand how dogs make sense of the complexities and nuances of their social environment. To do so, I design puzzles and games that test dogs’ social and emotional intelligence. To solve these puzzles and earn snacks, dogs must demonstrate their ability to identify positive social and emotional traits in potential human social partners. These studies ask dogs to choose between “kind” and “mean,” “skilled” and “unskilled,” “happy” and “sad,” and “strong” and “weak” experimenters, based on the experimenters’ behaviors.

It turns out that dogs are quite skilled at this task, showing strong preferences for experimenters who display positive behaviors. This suggests that dogs are able to infer that the social interactions they observe relate to how these unknown humans might interact with them in the future. 

This research indicates that dogs are extremely perceptive to human social behavior and use it to inform their interactions with humans. These data have the potential to inform the way in which we humans interact with each other and with our canine companions.

Read More:
[Smithsonian] – The New Science of Our Ancient Bond With Dogs