Dogs distinguish human intentional and unintentional action
nature.com
nature.com
I want my children to have a dog Or may be two or three They'll learn from them more easily Than they will learn from me. A dog will teach them how to love, And have no grudge or hate I'm not so good at that myself But a dog will do it straight I want my children to have a dog, To be their pal and friend So they may learn that friendship Is faithful to the end. There never yet has been a dog That learned to double cross Nor catered to you when you won Then dropped you when you lost.
We're getting two rescues next month. Greyhounds again.
My most previous greyhound would play bite, which indicates to me he knew what a real bite does. On occasions I have said "ow ow" he would stop immediately and looked at me with surprise. I have also stepped on him or otherwise jostled him by accident, and I immediately and profusely said "sorry, sorry", and he would lick my hand as if he understood it was a mistake. Am I anthropomorphising the behavior? I've never doubted that dogs could differentiate what is intentional and unintentional.
It isn't just that dogs know when it was a mistake or not, they do, they also want the apology. Apologies are always key, even if predictable.
I believe this is because I didn't know how to win another thing's affection. A dog just gives it to you. Unconditionally.
https://books.google.com/books?id=qQeGw2mIy9kC&pg=PA22&lpg=P...
I bought her a Mac, and the Windows sound ritual ceased.
A couple of years later, I found a youtube video compilation of every Windows signature sound and I played it. Despite it being the middle of the afternoon, the moment that specific log out tune played, the two dogs leapt up and went to their crates.
(I wonder what he thinks this magical sound IS, but I guess the answer is he does not think, he just accepts. Dogs are have a wonderful lack of introspective angst, they just take the world as they find it.)
I was (and still am) a really heavy sleeper, but it would wake me up instantly.
Rest In Peace my old best friends, you’ll never be forgotten.
You're right to say it's hard, but so is life. The companionship is worth the grief for me.
It took me a surprisingly long time to come to terms with my first dog's death. But the memories have made it all worth it.
I inadvertently trained my dog to recognize Frozen Creek by Circa Survive. Years later all it takes to calm him down is to play the opening to that song. I attribute it to a day or two where I had the album on repeatedly and and he wasn’t feeling well - pretty sure he just ate something he shouldn’t have - and he’d come lay in my lap and sleep.
Anecdotically, I adopted a mistreated dog this year. He's a really good boy, and shows the exact same behaviour the paper states regarding accidental interactions in general. But if you are for example brooming and slightly touch him, he immediately hides and may even piss himself. It seems to me that he was beaten up with some kind of stick when he was just a puppy. Poor boy :(
Took a while for him to get comfortable and after giving him a lot of positive reinforcement and space he’s become the most extroverted love bug I’ve ever met. He regularly smashes up against me when I’m on the couch and at the most inconvenient times because he’s got the grace of an unsupported blob of ballistics gel, but what I love most about his growth over the last two years is that now he’ll even try to put his nose under unsuspecting pedestrian’s hands on walks! Even if they’re Asian men!
He only pees now when he knows he’s in trouble
Anyhow, I don't always think these behaviors are the result of tragic circumstances, even if they often are.
It's weird that your dog still has the same behavior after one year with "his own family".
I think playing with a dog has a lot of "accidental" touches that should make him accessible to those actions.
I also don't think it was a stick, since my own abused dog was afraid of sticks in particular. As long as we had one it was okay and he didn't care ( since we played with it). But if someone unfamiliar would try that, he would become aggressive ( happened one time many years after, when an older guy with a walking stick came over and wanted to silence/move the dog with his cane. Luckily I was nearby and heard the sound immediately )
take care
may y'all have the nicest times
Oliver Wendell Holmes
What makes these types of discoveries become headlines? I don't get it.
So I do think it's newsworthy that animals are able to parse complex human action and intent.
Sharks are exceptionally good at maintaining their species (self cloning for large animals is amazing). Dogs (and wolves) have exceptional senses of smell. The hearts of most bird species are exceptionally better than those of mere mammals.
However, when it comes to the characteristics where we think humans are exceptional, I’ll only allow another animal to take the top spot if they start an argument.
To date, no animal has even started the argument… much less won it.
>When dogs interact with humans, they often show appropriate reactions to human intentional action. But it is unclear from these everyday observations whether the dogs simply respond to the action outcomes or whether they are able to discriminate between different categories of actions. Are dogs able to distinguish intentional human actions from unintentional ones, even when the action outcomes are the same?
It is newsworthy because new evidence has been found.
It's a game of stepping stones. It does however say a lot about the state of today's science - that is - how far we've come. We haven't come very far.
Edit: I'm not sure why this is so controversial. The essence is: every experiment starts with an assumption.
I think it's a better way to deal with things, as your assumption might not hold scrutiny very well : what is natural world ? Are worms part of it ? What about rocks ? Can we deduce from there that worms and rocks are able to distinguish intentional from non intentional actions ?
the most simple algorithms (few lines of code) can perceive the observer into thinking there is advanced KI at work.
Same might be the case with natural intelligence.
They don't assume they are dumb, they just don't assume anything, as they should.
Assuming the natural world is dumb is simple, consistent, and easy to explain.
If you start with the assumption the natural world is “smart”, what does that even mean? Does it mean that we should assume dog can do calculus, but choose not to? Or that dogs are capable of complex communication, but also choose not to?
Saying the natural world is “smart” is a pretty meaningless statement. How smart is “smart”, everyone will have a different opinion, so you can’t use it as the basis for discovery or discussion.
However everyone understands what the natural world being dumb means. From there you can start the journey of proving step-by-step where the smarts are.
We don’t assume nothing, that’s clearly not true. A basic assumption we make is that the natural world is capable of perceiving us and responding to our actions.
The question we’re normally testing is how complex the process between perception and response is. As general rule we assume that process is extremely simple (“dumb”), and work to understand how complex (“smart”) it actually is.
For example, in this paper the scientists didn’t start by proving the dogs were capable of observing the humans and responding to their actions. That was a given. What was tested was how complex the dogs perception and decision making process was.
Using words like “dumb” and “smart” are extremely crude. But it’s the words used by GP and OP.
I think it is reasonable to assume that domesticated animals are at least somewhat intelligent. After all, they convinced us to shelter, protect and feed them!
All studies are done by scientists who are desperate to get published and have their work referenced.
Even a cursory glance at that corner of funny-cute-etc-animals YouTube videos will convince that animals, especially mammals, have at least very complex internal and social lives.
It's isolating a particular aspect of intelligence to determine if it exists in a particular fashion. In this case, the question of if and how dogs are aware of human agency. This is a very interesting question.
The exact same falsifying process is used with studies about humans. Using these processes we've significantly changed our understanding of human cognition in the last century so it seems like it's working!
No one's suggesting that dogs or people aren't intelligent. The question is exactly how this intelligence functions, because there are many ways to reach a particular conclusion.
[1] https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/02/medieval-animal-tri...
When I accidentally stepped on my dogs paw as a teen, the dog looked hurt and disappointed. The same dog barked at my sister when she tried to stick a pencil up his nose.
Did the dog differentiate the scenarios based on intent or did it recognize my apologetic behaviour as non threatening? Or was it because my interactions with the dog were almost always positive while my sisters were not? Or simply because a pencil up the nose might have hurt a lot? Or because it was a hunting dog and we had hunted together multiple times? Was the dog actually disappointed in me or had they evolved to fake that by adjusting their eyebrows to this situation? Or did I project that emotion?
Apologetic behavior is a pretty good post-facto signal of intent! Humans also rely on it with each other. So I'm not sure that relying on sort of secondary signals like that is a real problem for the theory that dogs can read and care about human intent.
The hypothesis 'the dog can differentiate between A and B' is very hard to falsify. Because the dog could differentiate, but choose to not act. You would need a fairly complete understanding of the dogs mental workings, and scanners to study them.
On the other hand, 'the dog can't differentiate between A and B' is much easier to falsify. If you repeat an experiment a sufficient amount of times and the dog consistently has different behavior between A and B, you can rule this null hypothesis out.
That is the real reason we always 'assume the worst'. Because 'assume the worst' is the easiest to scientifically rule out.
EDIT: I would suggest this video by Veritasium, which also touches on this, at a very fundamental level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKA4w2O61Xo.
how would it even be possible to reach that conclusion?
You will have a very hard time taming an animal if you think it feels no pain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruelty_to_Animals_Act,_1876
The act states that:
> "Researchers would be prosecuted for cruelty, unless they conformed to its provisions, which required that an experiment involving the infliction of pain upon animals to only be conducted when "the proposed experiments are absolutely necessary for the due instruction of the persons [so they may go on to use the instruction] to save or prolong human life"
It also contains punishments for not giving animals anesthestia, which is a ridiculous waste of resources if "people didn't even think animals felt pain until the 1980s."
This longish essay is a good introduction to the philosophical history behind your question: https://philosophynow.org/issues/108/Descartes_versus_Cudwor...
You just described the Karl Popper criterion. [0] It's the most rigorous way of doing science. The same also kind of exists in law with the innocent "till proven guilty"
My wife and I like to call the studies that prove the obvious, "no shit studies," because they really aren't surprising. In this specific context, very few scientists doubt that animals have emotions and intelligence. The thing is, you still have to do the experiment to know for certain. It happens fairly regularly that we discover things that seem obvious are actually wrong.
When my dog was a puppy, he ran around my feet like crazy and I accidentally stepped on his paws a couple of times. He was not mad at me at all, he just learned to keep some distance when going for a walk.
And of course, nearly every dog uses them to scratch their own itches.
[1]https://www.amazon.com/PoochieBells-Original-Handcrafted-Col...
Animals will often misinterpret an attempt to pet with an attempt to grab. It helps a lot to attempt to pet with the back of your hand rather than your palm and fingers.
She does show a chihuahua great grandparent, but otherwise is native central american. people mistake her for a yellow lab since they gravitate towards certainty and in so doing ignore entirely non lab features in coloring and geometry, and behavior.
Curiously the Dingos and the dogs you might see being brought back from the Middle East theaters of war to europe/americas look super similar.
My conjecture is that this is the natural dog, that you could recreate things like a yellow lab with many generations of selective breeding, that Huskies and Malamutes likely are more wolf related. But it's only a conjecture.
Look at EmbarkVet.com for one source of canine dna documentation, I'd suggest.
E.g. when given a command to cross a street in front of a driving car, the dog is trained to push the human the other way.
I guess this is mostly about paying attention to surroundings. Part of me hopes there's a little of "my human made a mistake in assesing the safety of this action" there too.
I have hurt some of our four-legged family members - kicking them because I didn't see them, or stepping on their tail - and the very first thing they always want to know is if I did it on purpose or by accident.
I wonder why this would even be the subject of research? And if it were, how could you possibly conduct an ethical experiment around it?
How many dogs and cats have you personally lived with?
Have you ever hurt them, intentionally or by mistake?
Did their response change based on whether you reassured them that it was an accident, or making it clear you really meant to hurt them?
And honestly, I have to say I am a bit offended by being accused of anthropomophism.
I am not attributing "human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities" like the dogs and cats I've lived with.
I am doing my best to understand their dog and cat emotions. They are not human emotions, they are dog and cat emotions. You can't deny that they are emotional creatures, and it is my job as their caregiver and protector to understand them and meet them where they are.
What you’re saying is clearly correct. The OP’s post supports this. I was simply telling you why studies like these are necessary: because things that can seem very real can be a case of cognitive bias. A scientist’s job is to gather evidence to reveal whether what we perceive is real or illusion.
No matter how much data you collect, when you're assessing behaviour there's always a subjective interpretation of how behaviours differ and what they mean in context.
Experiments like these simply disguise and hide the subjectivity.
Questions of subjective experience are absolutely unprovable scientifically.
You can collect correlations between stimuli and responses, but when you're done you have a table of correlations between stimuli and responses - and that's all.
In practice we assume that our own states correlate with behaviours, and this also applies to other humans in a straightforward way. (It often doesn't, but it's a nice thing to believe.) From there it's an easy step to making the same mapping for certain animals, albeit with more of a stretch.
But this is all unprovable, even as a hypothesis. All you can say objectively is that stimuli either match or don't match expected behaviours.
That's all that's ever on the table.
That's not the topic we're discussing but this isn't meaningfully different from the "are we in a simulation" question.
This particular question is about animals understanding the difference accidents and not, which is a super interesting question because they can't communicate. This is something you can construct experiments around and observe different behaviors.
For data you need to actually measure a response in a controlled environment. Making sure you record both the interesting, and non-interesting, responses so you can compare them.
Humans have a very strong natural tendency to only remember and evaluate interesting responses. Causing us to vastly overestimate the frequency of interesting outcomes. That paired with our brains strong desire to pattern match, means we’re terrible at making accurate observations on a day-to-day basis.
Hence scientists do experiments like this to discover what aspects of our intuition are accurate, and what parts are inaccurate.
I stop and tell her get how sorry I am, which did not make much sense and probably confuses the cat even more. Same with a dog (when I had one).
Thanks for the interesting comment about something I never have a deeper thought to.
Thanks for giving this some thought. Really, it does make sense to your dog or cat.
When cats play, they often will hurt each other a bit as they tumble and play. Same with dogs. Just watch their behavior afterward.
If they really meant to hurt each other, the attack will continue. If it was an accident, they will stop, smell each others' butts, see if everyone was OK, and then either take a rest or get back to playing.
Two of our cats love to toss and tumble every night. If you didn't know, you might think they were fighting. But they are best of friends and love to play like that.
I suppose this is the bottom line (quite literally): if you kick your cat, smell her butt!
No, seriously, you don't need to do that. Cats and dogs have an amazing talent for reading human emotions. So just reassure her that you didn't mean to do it. A little head scratch, pet her, and she will get the message.
What I meant is that it may be better to just continue walking after having stepped on them as if nothing happened, rather than making the event special.
I have more experience with children than with cats so this may be the reason (when my children fell and hurt themselves (in the "usual way"), they would look around to check how parents react. If we did as if nothing happened or just casually acknowledged the accident, they would usually go ahead with what they were doing. Running to them with "poor baby!" was the worst thing to do (in our case at least))
Dogs are like this, too. This is how a lot of owners end up reinforcing fear and fear-related aggression: cooing and fawning when their dog is shaking with fear, growling, or barking.
I've had dogs who are smaller than most cats. When I step on a paw, I do apologize and I do check on the critter, but I try to keep it low-drama so as not to feed into all that.
I just pick them up and gently squeeze each paw with gradually increasing firmness, while I watch to gauge the reactions. This lets me know whether he's actually hurt or the yelping was more anticipatory (like a 'watch out!') and if the former, which paw it was and a little bit about how bad it is. Then I give them a quick and cheerful apology and I pet them or throw a toy to chase or something like that.
If you want I can try to find some more authoritative resources on this, but basically your intuitions and the analogy from your kids are right on afaik.
At any rate, we humans have been “apologizing” to our pets like this forever. It’s almost instinctual to us. So I don’t think it’s a confusing experience for pets. It would probably more confusing for your pet if you were to suddenly stop this behavior.
This might have the side effect that they care less to avoid the situation next time (sometimes it's totally their fault, behind an opaque door how am I supposed to know they're sitting there? Of course it can move at some point), though the toilet door they seem to have been burned by often enough that they start running when the toilet flushes regardless of whether the door was cracked and we could each see each other's eyes so they know I know they're there ^^'
What experiments did you do to figure that out difference?
I love the dogs and cats that I have the privilege of living with. So no, I'm not going to do that.
Update: sorry I took some offense at your comment. Basically, I don't think this is a matter of science. Our dogs and cats are living, emotional creatures.
As their human, it is my intuition and interaction with them that best teaches me how to provide them with a loving and happy home.
Not sure why you would need to harm to test if they could understand intent.
Assumption is not science.
Superficial casuistry isn't science either.
If by that you mean that nobody should be experimenting by doing intentional harm to any animal which we can reasonably suspect to be able to experience pain then I agree. If you mean that emotions are beyond science to comprehend, then I'm curious why you think that is?
If I were to try to answer, TheOtherHobbes came closest to my feelings about it and explained better than I could:
1. https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs415...
It's not obvious that they need to model what the other animal (us) are "thinking" when they just need to pay attention to how we're moving our limbs which is correlated with wether something is by accident or intentional
Dogs are very emotional and can read human emotion. I can tell if my dog is happy, excited, bored, relaxed, angry, upset, scared, or confused. Similarly my dog can tell if someone likes them, doesn't like them, is sad, angry, and maybe other emotions.
And an empathy that is strongly compatible with humans.
We aren't just talking about understanding feelings. Empathy includes the ability to see and understand a situation from another person's mental and physical point of view.
Previous studies have shown that dogs can understand a human pointing at an object, and even mentally shift their perspective to understand what the human is pointing at from a completely different direction.
The implication of this study is that dogs are genuinely putting themselves in the human's point of view and understanding that the result was not what the human intended and failed due to clumsiness.
It seems that puppy body language has built-in preemptive apologies. All that snout licking and booking is basically, “I’m sorry I’m a PITA but look how cute I am!”
I leave very satisfied and thankful for your tales.