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Posts tagged ‘Dogs’

Can Your Dog Read Your Mind?

Can dogs read our minds? How do they learn to beg for food or behave badly primarily when we’re not looking? According to Monique Udell and her team, from the University of Florida in the US, the way that dogs come to respond to the level of people’s attentiveness tells us something about the ways dogs think and learn about human behavior. Their research, published online in Springer’s journal Learning & Behavior, suggests it is down to a combination of specific cues, context and previous experience.

Recent work has identified a remarkable range of human-like social behaviors in the domestic dog, including their ability to respond to human body language, verbal commands, and to attentional states. The question is, how do they do it? Do dogs infer humans’ mental states by observing their appearance and behavior under various circumstances and then respond accordingly? Or do they learn from experience by responding to environmental cues, the presence or absence of certain stimuli, or even human behavioral cues? Udell and colleagues’ work sheds some light on these questions.
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The Journal of Scientific Exploration

The Journal of Scientific Exploration (JSE) has just made their archive available online for free. If you have a chance, I would browse the entire archive. In the meantime, here are some interesting selections from Rupert’s work:

Experiment Effects in Scientific Research: How Widely Are They Neglected? by R Sheldrake
Abstract: A survey of recent papers published in a range of scientific journals showed that the use of blind methodologies is very rare in the so-called hard sciences. In the physical sciences, no blind experiments were found among the 237 papers reviewed. In the biological sciences, there were 7 blind experiments out of 914 (0.8%). There was a higher proportion in the medical sciences, 6 out of 102 (5.9%), and in psychology and animal behavior, 7 out of 143 (4.9%). By far the highest proportion (85.2%) was in parapsychology.

A Dog That Seems to Know When His Owner Is Coming Home by R. Sheldrake / P. Smart
Abstract: Many dog owners claim that their animals know when a member of the household is about to come home, showing their anticipation by waiting at a door or window. We have investigated such a dog, called Jaytee, in more than 100 videotaped experiments. His owner, Pam Smart (P.S.) traveled at least 7 km away from home while the place where the dog usually waited for her was filmed continuously.

Testing a Language-Using Parrot for Telepathy by R. Sheldrake / A. Morgana
Abstract: Aimée Morgana noticed that her language-using African Grey parrot, N’kisi, often seemed to respond to her thoughts and intentions in a seemingly telepathic manner. We set up a series of trials to test whether this apparent telepathic ability would be expressed in formal tests in which Aimée and the parrot were in different rooms, on different floors, under conditions in which the parrot could receive no sensory information from Aimée or from anyone else. During these trials, Aimée and the parrot were both videotaped continuously.

An Automated Online Telepathy Test by R. Sheldrake / M. Lambert
Abstract: This paper describes an automated online telepathy test in which each receiver had four senders. In a series of 10 trials the computer picked one of the senders at random and asked her to write a short message to the receiver. At the end of the one-minute trial period, the receiver was asked to guess which sender had written a message, and she received the message only after this guess had been recorded by the computer.

A Dog That Seems To Know When His Owner Is Coming Home by D. Radin
Abstract: Initial observations by Sheldrake and Smart from 1994 through 1997 suggested that a male terrier dog named Jaytee was able to anticipate when Smart was returning home. In a later series of 45 formal videotaped experiments, Jaytee’s anticipatory behavior proved to be significantly accurate. Although Jaytee’s performance was remarkably accurate on average, sometimes he failed to anticipate his owner’s return. Analysis of environmental variables on the days of the tests suggests that Jaytee’s behavior was significantly affected by changes in a complex assortment of geomagnetic and other environmental factors.

The Art Of Dying: Dogs Know

From Britian’s Daily Mail, “Cats who know exactly when they are going to be taken to the vets. Dogs who sense their owners’ whereabouts – even if they are miles away. And birds who seem to mourn the deaths of those around them… our pets and other animals have always been intuitive – but do they really have a mysterious sixth sense? A new book by Britain’s leading clinical authority on near-death experiences, Dr Peter Fenwick, and his wife Elizabeth, a counselor, examines the remarkable cases of psychic animals.”

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