Word: haring
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This fall, Hare is opening the Duke Canine Cognition Center, where he is going to test hundreds of dogs brought in by willing owners. Marc Hauser, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University, recently opened his own such research lab and has 1,000 dogs lined up as subjects. Other facilities are operating in the U.S. and Europe...
Evolving Gifts Hare suspects that the evolutionary pressures that turned suspicious wolves into outgoing dogs were similar to the ones that turned combative apes into cooperative humans. "Humans are unique. But how did that uniqueness evolve?" asks Hare. "That's where dogs are important...
Going to the Dogs Some scientists acquired their fascination with dogs directly, but Hare's grew out of his research on chimpanzee cognition in the late 1990s, when he was part of a team of primatologists led by Michael Tomasello, now at Max Planck. A chimp can follow the gaze of other chimps and figure out what they can and cannot see. That's a skill that seems to be limited to great apes and humans. Tomasello and his team wondered if such a rare ability extended to hand gestures and tested chimps to see if they could understand pointing...
...apparent explanation for these results was that pointing--and the social smarts behind it--required a humans-only level of intelligence and evolved in our ancestors only after they branched off from the ancestors of chimpanzees some 7 million years ago. When Tomasello suggested this idea to Hare, however, Hare demurred. "I said, 'Um, Mike, I think my dogs can do that,'" Hare recalls...
...Hare's later research revealed that while chimps and even wolves lack an innate ability to understand what pointing means, dogs come by the knowledge naturally. They're not limited to reading hands and fingers alone. Dogs understand what Hare means if he points with his foot or sets a piece of wood on top of a container with food inside. Even puppies understand, which means it can't be a skill they need to learn. "This is something that dogs just do," says Hare...