Born to Work
Mixed-breed Berkeley (pronounced "Barkley") works as a service dog for Deak Helton's wife, who is hearing impaired. Helton theorizes that dogs may use higher reasoning to master new skills.
Dogs and humans share a peculiar trait: we both are workaholics
Generally, other animal species are a little on the lazy side. Primates, our closest living relatives, assiduously avoid going the extra mile. Most draft animals—think mules—work just as long as they have to and then trot back to the barn lickety-split. "And good luck trying to get cats to work," notes William "Deak" Helton, an assistant professor of psychology at Michigan Tech.
But just as people proudly log fourteen-hour days in the office, so will huskies haul heavy sleds across the Yukon and black labs leap into frigid water to retrieve game for their masters. This yen to work means that we might be able to learn a lot about our own Type A behavior by studying dogs on the job, Helton says.
It's a novel approach. While people have been observing and training dogs for thousands of years, scientists can't agree among themselves whether or not dogs are even conscious. "For people who have been around animals a lot, it's 'No duh, of course they're conscious,'" Helton says. But for researchers who adhere to the theory that animals merely respond to stimuli, the idea that they are capable of higher reasoning is still controversial.
Helton himself became convinced that dogs were doing a lot more than responding to stimuli while he was still a graduate student. His aha moment came when he was helping train a service dog, named Kiowa, for his wife who is hearing impaired.
After a process of operant conditioning—rewarding correct behavior—Kiowa had mastered a repertoire of responses to different noises, from the doorbell chime to the beep of the microwave. "Then suddenly, he got it," Helton recalls. "It was as if he put it all together and realized what his job was."
Kiowa began leading his handler in the direction of other sounds, such as a whistling tea kettle and the gurgle of a bathtub filling to capacity. When Helton brought the matter up with his mentors in his graduate program, however, they were skeptical and suggested that the dog was simply responding to sounds that were similar to those he had already learned. That didn't convince Helton; running water in a bathtub sounds nothing like a ringing phone, he reasoned.
It did prompt him to consider using working dogs as a model for human learning, however, particularly for developing expertise. Psychologists have always been stymied in studying how humans become experts in a task because variables, including talent and a willingness to take part in training, are so hard to control.
It's much easier to manage such variables in dogs, however. For example, dogs can be relied on to actually show up and participate in an experiment. And Helton has conducted preliminary observations of "agility dogs" and theorizes that we can learn a great deal about ourselves by studying these canine athletes.
Agility is a relatively new sport, in which dogs tackle a complex obstacle course that involves weaving slalom-style through a series of poles, shimmying through tunnels, and leaping through tires at the direction of their handlers.
Deak Helton with Berkeley
Novice dogs make lots of mistakes. In the beginning, they have trouble running the course while simultaneously taking direction from their handlers. Eventually, however, the moves become almost automatic, and the dogs become adept at responding to their handlers' signals.
This process of learning something to the point that you don't have to think about it, known as "automatization," is commonplace. For example, learning to drive a car requires total concentration. But as we gain mastery, we can do two and even three things at once: listen to the radio, talk with the passengers, and slam on the brakes to avoid a pedestrian.
Helton hopes to learn more about how dogs—and by extension, people—automatize by teaching local dogs the sport of agility. With the cooperation of Keweenaw pet owners, he plans to train and test the dogs, tracking the development of their basic abilities and how well they automatize.
"This research may have significant implications for the continuing debate over the role of inherent talent in expertise," says Helton. And it could also have implications in the area of "human factors," a new branch of psychology that looks at how the products and systems that surround us influence our performance and behavior.
Whatever the result, it's important to learn more about how dogs learn, simply because they do so much important work, Helton says. In addition to their traditional service and search-and-rescue jobs, dogs now do tasks ranging from sniffing out cancer to detecting mold in buildings. Thus, humans have a vested interest in improving what he calls "canine factors."
"For instance, how could we manipulate their environment to increase their attention span?" Helton asks.
The question is more than academic. You wouldn't want an airport security inspector to overlook a weapon in a carry-on bag or a bomb-sniffing dog to lose interest at the wrong moment. And perhaps, Helton says, the knowledge gained from one scenario may one day better inform the other.