Alexandra Horowitz’s research while affiliated with DeVry College and other places

Our relationship with dogs runs thousands of years deep. Today, we might know dogs intimately as members of our human family, but we can also know and consider dogs on their own terms, as members of Canis familiaris , with a unique evolutionary history and species‐specific characteristics and needs. This chapter is a resource for all types of dog knowers and caretakers. It relies heavily on empirical research to anchor readers in the foundations of canine behavior—such as dog behavioral development, normal dog behavior, factors influencing behavior, and relationships with people—and considers how these topics affect dogs of all ages and backgrounds who find themselves in the shelter environment.

This chapter begins with the evolutionary history of dogs. A debate rages about how long ago, and where, a distinct species of dog appeared, given conflicting evidence from archeological sites and genetic analyses. When interacting with dogs, people need to be aware of dog visual, acoustic, and olfactory communication. Olfaction plays an important role in intra- and inter-specific social encounters. The chapter discusses the various patterns of dog communication that are particularly relevant for shelter and foster-care settings. It also presents some of the factors that can affect dog in-shelter behavior. Dogs tend to be on leash (or in kennels) when seeing other dogs, and interaction might be thwarted due to shelter regulations. Because of the importance of inter- and intra-specific interactions and exposure to stimuli and social experiences, shelters with puppies under their care should prioritize early-life socialization or find appropriate housing outside the shelter.

Despite the growing interest in research on the interaction between humans and dogs, only a very few research projects focus on the routines between dogs and their owners. In this study, we investigated one such routine: dog-human play. Dyadic interspecific play is known to be a common interaction between owner and charge, but the details of what counts as play have not been thoroughly researched. Similarly, though people represent that "play" is pleasurable, no study has yet undertaken to determine whether different forms of play are associated with different affective states. Thus, we aimed to generate an inventory of the forms of dyadic play, the vocalizations within play, and to investigate the relationship of affect to elements of play. Via a global citizen science project, we solicited videotapes of dog-human play sessions from dog owners. We coded 187 play bouts via frame-by-frame video playback. We then assessed the relationship between various intra-bout variables and owner affect (positive or neutral) during play (dog affect was overwhelmingly positive). Amount of physical contact ("touch"), level of activity of owner ("movement"), and physical closeness of dog-owner dyad ("proximity") were highly correlated with positive affect. Owner vocalizations were found to contain different elements in positive- and neutral-affect play. One novel category of play, "tease", was found. We conclude that not all play is created equal: the experience of play to the owner participant is strongly related to a few identifiable characteristics of the interaction.

This study systematically investigated peoples' preferences for dog physical attributes in images of real-life dogs. Participants (n = 124) completed an aesthetic-preference test wherein they viewed 80 image pairs of mixed-breed adult dogs and were asked which image they “liked best.” In each image pair, the two dog images appeared to be nearly identical, but unbeknownst to participants, the images differed slightly in that one physical characteristic had been manipulated. By altering a single physical characteristic in each image pair, participant preference for each of 14 different physical attributes could be investigated over the course of the study. The feature manipulations examined theories relating to Kindchenschema (an infantile appearance, per Konrad lorenz), ostensive human similarity, the process of domestication, as well as differences in attribute size and symmetry. The results showed that participants preferred some features associated with the infant schema—large eyes and wider-set eyes. They also preferred certain human-like attributes: colored irises and a distinct upturn of the commissure, seeming to capture a smile. By contrast, participants did not reveal a preference for physical characteristics relating to feature size, symmetry or the process of domestication. The findings suggest that identifiable physical attributes of domestic dogs have aesthetic value and, additionally, that human preferences for aesthetic differences can be systematically investigated. Given that people attend to and care about the way dogs look, the effects of particular physical attributes on peoples' preferences merit investigation.

As a companion to humans, the domestic dog is naturally interpreted from a human-centered (anthropocentric) perspective. Indeed, dog behavior and actions are often explained by using anthropomorphisms: attributions to the dog that would hold if the actor were human. While sometimes useful, anthropomorphisms also have the potential to be misleading or incorrect. In this chapter we describe work to replace an anthropocentric perspective with a more dog-centered research program. First we detail research systematically testing anthropomorphisms of emotional complexity-the appearance of guilt and jealousy-that are made of dogs, by testing the context of appearance of the guilty look and by testing advantageous and disadvantageous inequity aversion. Relatedly, we describe research looking at the contribution of specific dog physical attributes to human preference and anthropomorphizing. Finally, we identify anthropocentric and canid-centric elements of our own and others' research, and suggest ways that research can be more sensitive to the dog's umwelt. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. All rights are reserved.

The performance of tracking dogs and drug-, disease-, and explosives-detection dogs is a testament to trained dogs’ olfactory acuity. The olfactory experience of an untrained dog, by contrast, has not been well documented. In the current research we begin to remedy that by testing untrained pet dogs’ olfactory perception of quantity. While previous research found that dogs could discriminate visible quantities of more or less food (Prato-Previde, Marshall-Pescini, & Valsecchi, 2008), our results find that, by contrast, companion dogs do not reliably discriminate quantities when the food can be smelled but not seen. Sixty-one percent of dogs (39 of 64), given a choice between closed plates with one and five morsels of food, approached plates with the larger quantity: not significantly more than approached plates with the lesser quantity (binomial, p = .169). We did find that during dogs’ initial investigation of both food amounts, subjects gave more attention to the plate containing the larger quantity (binomial, p < 0.001). In a second condition, we replicated, with closed plates, Prato-Previde et al.’s (2008) finding that owner interest in a plate holding a lesser quantity of food reliably leads dogs to approach that plate (binomial, p < 0.001). Though research has demonstrated dogs’ preference for a larger amount of food (Ward & Smuts, 2007), in a third condition testing the effect of adding a strong odor to a visibly larger food quantity, we found that the addition of odor often reversed that preference (44/69 dogs; p < .03). Finally, we consider the methodological implications of this work on future dog cognition studies.