During the last 10 days we published a series of posts that discussed the latest research on canine cognition, stimulated by a special issue of the Psychonomic Society’s journal Learning & Behavior.

The digital event has now been given a permanent home at this portal, from which you can access all posts. Here is a brief recap of the material we have accumulated:

• Stephan Lewandowsky kicked off the discussion and provided an overview of the special issue.
• Jeff Katz and Ludwig Huber, the guest editors of the special issue, explain why canine cognition is of such interest, namely because dogs provide a model for short-term cognitive evolution. That is, one of the reasons dogs are so compatible with humans today is because we selected them for those traits.
• Shannon Kunney examined the extent to which dogs are capable of genuine empathy and prosocial helping behaviour. Dogs exhibit signs of distress when they hear a baby cry or whine, and they are also quicker to help if they sense that a human is in distress.
• Péter Pongrácz asked how dogs manage to live in a world full of strangers. On the one hand, dogs form attachments to individual people and are distressed when their owner disappears. On the other hand, dogs can form new bonds relatively quickly with a stranger.
• William Roberts investigated whether dogs have a theory of mind or whether they are merely capable of a theory of attention. There is good evidence that dogs behave as though they infer what a human knows, but the possibility that this might reflect an exquisite ability to read people’s attention has not been ruled out.
• Lucia Lazarowski addressed the conundrum of why dogs will obey commands that are clearly deceptive. If dogs know that a human is doing something “wrong”, they still obey the person—albeit in an attenuated manner. An eagerness to assuage a human partner even when the person is wrong has clear adaptive advantages, and it may be a sign of just how clever dogs are.
• Finally, one of our Digital Associate Editors, Heather Hill, explained how important fairness is to many species—from humans to capuchin monkeys and also to dogs. One reason dogs may care about “fairness”, that is whether they receive as much food as a conspecific, is because inequity aversion likely promote cooperation.

If you want to return to these posts or inform others of our discussion, just bookmark this portal.