William James Hall Goes to the Dogs

Are dogs really man’s best friend? The Harvard Cognitive Evolution Lab in William James Hall, now home to more than 1,000 dogs, may hold the answer. The dogs will be used in behavior studies, which, according to Psychology Professor Marc D. Hauser, the leader of the study, will reveal “the extent to which domestication will change dogs into the proximity of human thinking.”

The lab formerly housed 40 cottontop tamarin monkeys but were recently replaced by dogs because of the high cost of caring for the monkeys. This switch from monkeys to dogs has struck fear into the hearts of many on-campus dog-lovers, who worry that the dogs will be used in harsh tests. “They don’t hook the dogs up to those crazy electro things, do they?” wonders Cabot Librarian and campus-renowned animal-lover Ronald N. Lacey.

“All of the studies are benign,” assures Hauser. “The dogs will get free rewards for finding things.”

The study will explore dogs’ sensitivity to human interaction and cues. “We are trying to understand whether dogs’ behavior really reflects the way we see and feel about the world,” says Hauser. “Dogs are very sensitive to human cues, such as following a finger to a target object.”

While monkeys and chimpanzees have been used in similar studies, Hauser believes that dogs have a higher ability to follow such human cues. “Chimpanzees are much closer in many ways, in terms of genetics, but cannot follow this cue that we have been following since infancy.”

While this mental sophistication might come as a surprise to some, an avid dog-lover attests to the study’s truth. “Of course it doesn’t surprise me that dogs behave more similarly to humans than chimps,” says Melissa C. Oppenheim ’12. “Dogs are man’s best friends.”