Strummer participated today for the third time in studies at the
Canine Cognition Lab at Harvard University. Here she is outside William James Hall—the home of the Canine Cognition Lab—with Dan, a summer intern who is studying Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania. For her contribution, she was awarded a Certificate of Canine Achievement (see below).
Strummer participated in two experiments, one studying whether dogs are reading the intentions of a human pointing, and another exploring whether dogs have a sense of fairness. Of course, because of her training and good manners, Strummer, again, didn't get past the warm-up exercises.
I would have been really interested to see Strummer performing in the experiment on fairness. When I give another dog a treat in Strummer's presence, my sense of equity prompts me to offer her a treat, too. If Strummer has a sense of equity, however, I don't think it's as simple as if-another-dog-gets-a-treat-it's-only-fair-that-I-get-one-too. For one thing, she doesn't necessarily accept a treat that is offered just because I offered one to another dog. On the other hand, when we are visiting my parents, if my father gives his younger, larger male German Shepherd Dog, Shadow, a treat, Strummer will cock her head and raise her ears. But then my dad is a pez dispenser, so it may not be so much that Strummer thinks it's fair that he give her a treat, too; she may have been trained to expect one.
I wonder if Strummer would feel that a young male didn't deserve the food as much as she deserved it. Would she use access to food to demonstrate her seniority to another female? I expect that she would probably defer to another dog if she felt the food were his—just as she always defers to other dogs when chasing balls or sticks: When she's playing it doesn't matter who gets the toy as long as everyone gets to keep playing.
But, alas, Strummer is not the dog that will reveal the secrets of canine cognition in a controlled experiment.
I did appreciate learning that one of the papers that the Lab is trying to get published is about dogs' behavior during the warm-up exercises as a predictor for their behavior in the experiments. I'm sure that Strummer's work is central to that study!
Also, when I told Dan that I would be posting (and had posted before) about the Canine Cognition Lab on the somerville dog weblog, he mentioned that a lot of Somerville dogs participate in the studies! Somerville dogs are contributing to science!
