EXTREME PERCEPTION AND ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE

Extreme Perception and Animal Intelligence

Many animals also have extreme perception. Forensic dogs are three times as good as any X-ray machine at sniffing out contraband, drugs, or explosives, and their overall success rate on tests is 90 percent. The fact that a dog can smell things a person can't doesn't make him a genius; it just makes him a dog. Humans can see things dogs can't, but that doesn't make us smarter. But when you look at the jobs some dogs have invented for them­selves using their advanced perceptual abilities, you're moving into the realm of true cognition, which is solving a problem under novel conditions.

The seizure alert dogs are an example of an animal using advanced perceptual abilities to solve a problem no dog was born knowing how to solve. Seizure alert dogs are dogs who, their owners say, can predict a seizure before it starts. There's still controversy over whether you can train dog to predict seizures, and so far peo­ple haven't had a lot of luck trying. But there are a number of dogs who have figured it out on their own. These dogs were trained as seizure-response dogs, meaning they can help a person once a seizure has begun.

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The dog might be trained to lie on top of the person so he doesn't hurt himself, or bring the person his medicine or the telephone. Those are all standard helpful behaviors any dog can be trained to perform. But some of these dogs have gone from responding to seizures to perceiving signs of a seizure ahead of time. No one knows how they do this,because the signs are invisible to people. No human being can look at someone who's about to have a seizure and see (or hear, smell, or feel) what's coming. Yet one study found that 10 percent of owners said their seizure response dogs had turned into seizure alert dogs.

The New York Times published a terrific article about a woman named Connie Standley, in Florida, who has two huge Bouvier des Flandres dogs who predict her seizures about thirty minutes ahead of time. When they sense Ms. Standley is heading into a seizure they'll do things like pull on her clothes, bark at her, or drag on her hand to get her to someplace safe so she won't get hurt whenthe seizure begins. Ms. Standley says they predict about 80 percent of her seizures Ms. Standley'S dogs apparently were trained as seizure alert dogs before they came to her, but there aren't many dogs in that category.

Most of the seizure alert dogs were trained to respond to seizures, not predict seizures. The seizure alert dogs remind me of Clever Hans. Hans was the world-famous German horse in the early 1900s whose owner, Wilhelm von Osten, thought he could count. Herr von Osten could ask the horse questions like, "What's seven and five? " and Hans would tap out the number 12 with his hoof. Hans could even tap out answers to questions like, "If the eighth day of the month comes on Tuesday, what is the date for the following Friday? " .

He could answer mathe­ matical questions posed to him by complete strangers, too. Eventually a psychologist named Oskar Pfungst managed to show that Hans wasn't really counting. Instead, Hans was observing sub­ tle, unconscious cues the humans had no idea they were giving of He'd start tapping his foot when he could see it was time to start tapping; then he'd stop tapping his foot when he saw it was time to stop tapping. His questioners were making tiny, move­ ments only Hans could see. The movements were so tiny the humans making themcouldn't even feel them. Dr.

Pfungst couldn't see the movements, either, and he was look­ ing for them. He finally solved the case by putting Hans's question­ers out of view and having them ask Hans questions they didn't know the answers to themselves. It turned out Hans could answer questions only when the person asking the question was in plain view and already knew the answer. If either condition was missing, his performance fell apart. Psychologists often use the Clever Hans story to show that humans who believe animals are intelligent are deluding themselves. But that's not the obvious conclusion as far as I'm concerned.

No one has ever been able to train a horse to do what Hans did. Hans trained himself. Is the ability to read a member of a different species as well as Hans was reading human beings really a sign that he was just a "dumb animal" who'd been classically conditioned to stamp his hoof? I think there'smore to it than that. What makes Hans similar to the seizure alert dogs is that both Hans and the dogs acquired their skills without human help. As I mentioned, to my knowledge, so far no one's figured out how to take a "raw" dog and teach it how to predict seizures.

About the best a trainer can do is reward the dogs for helping when a person is having a seizure and then leave it up to the dog to star identifYing signs that predict the onset of a seizure on his own. That approach hasn't been hugely successful, but some dogs do it. I think those dogs are showing superior intelligence the same way a human who can do something few other people can do shows superior intelli­gence. What makes the actions of the seizure alert dogs, and probably of Hans, too, a sign of high intelligence--or high talent-is the fact that they didn't have to do what they did.

It's one thing for a dog to start recognizing the signs that a seizure coming; you might chalk that up to unique aspects of canine hearing, smell, or vision, like the fact that a dog can hear a dog whistle while a human can't. But it's another thing for a dog to start to recognize the signs of an impend­ing seizure and then decide to do something about it. That's what intelligence is in humans; intelligence is people using their built-in perceptual and cognitive skills to achieve useful and sometimes remarkable goals.

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