Source: WSJ Blogs

How do the minds of dogs really work? Researchers at the Duke Canine Cognition Center, at Harvard and other labs around the world are trying to find out, according to a story on Time magazine’s Web site.

The rule of thumb in studying dog behavior is not to think your dog can do things just because it looks like it can. “We say to owners, Look you may have intuitions about your dog that are valuable,” Marc Hauser, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, told Time. “But they might be wrong.”

For instance, that “kiss” from your dog when you get home at night? That could be about hunger, not affection, according to Time. Wolves lick each others’ mouths to figure out if a member of their pack has caught any prey, so that may be what your dog is doing to you, too.

According to some experiments, dogs are more clever than humans — babies, that is. While 10-month-old human infants get tricked when they watch an experimenter hide an object under a cup and sometimes pick the wrong one, dogs are less likely to make the mistake.