We’re related, sure, but those primates haven’t spent much time interacting with us. “My entry into the dog work came not from necessarily being interested in dogs per se, but in theoretical questions that came out of the primate work.” She recalls thinking of primates, “If anybody’s going to share humanlike cognition, it’s going to be them.”īut it wasn’t. Important about what makes humans special.” Santos believes that studying canines will “tell us something She started out studying primates, and found that by studying them she could learn about us. She was curious about curiosity, and the nature of why we are who we are. Her interest in psychology goes back to her girlhood in New Bedford, Massachusetts. She is a TED Talks star and a media sensation for teaching the most popular course in the history of Yale, “ Psychology and the Good Life,” which most folks around here refer to as the Happiness Class (and which became “ The Happiness Lab” podcast). She received undergraduate degrees in biology and psychology and a PhD in psychology, all from Harvard. Santos, who radiates the kind of energy you’d expect from one of her students, is a psychologist and one of the nation’s preeminent experts on human cognition and the evolutionary processes that inform it. I’m here to meet Laurie Santos, director of the Comparative Cognition Laboratory and the Canine Cognition Center. The laboratory occupies a pleasant white cottage on a leafy New Haven street a few steps down Science Hill from the divinity school. It turns out studying dogs to find out how they learn can teach you and me what it means to be human. The goal is to assess the dog’s response to human dominance behavior.Īnd in that moment will be a million years of memory and history, biology and psychology and ten thousand generations of evolution-his and yours and mine-of countless nights in the forest inching closer to the firelight, of competition and cooperation and eventual companionship, of devotion and loyalty and affection. The dog will observe how people yield space to one another on a tape-marked floor. Right, Winston waits behind a curtain as researchers set up an experiment.
Left, Bailey, a 100 percent Yorkie, in the waiting area of the Canine Cognition Research Lab at Yale University with her owner, Judy Dermer. This article is a selection from the December issue of Smithsonian magazine Buy
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