Many Animals Have Extreme Perception

Many animals 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 is 90 percent.
The fact that dogs can smell things a person can't doesn't make him a genius; it just makes him a dog. Human can see things dogs can't, but that doesn't make us smarted. But when you look at the jobs somedogs 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 who, their owners say, can predict a seizure before it stars.There's still controversy over whether you can train a dog to predict seizures, and so far people haven't has 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. The dog might be trained to lie on top of the person so he doesn't hurt himself, or bringthe 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 is about to have a seizure and see what's coming. Yet onestudy 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 de 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 herclothes, bark at her, or drag on her hand to get her to someplace safe so she won't get hurt when the 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 seizure alert dogs were trained to respond to seizures, not predict seizures.The seizure alert dogs remind me of Clever Hans. Hans was the word-famous German house 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 twelve with his hoof. Hans could even tap out answers to questions like, "If the eighth day of the month comes on Tuesday, whatis the date for the following Friday?" He could answer mathematical 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 subtle, unconscious cues the humans had no idea they were giving off. He'd start tapping his foot when he could see it was time to start tapping; thenhe'd stop tapping his foot when he could see it was time to stop tapping. His questions were making tiny, unconscious movements only Hans could see. The movements were so tiny the humans making them couldn't even feel them.
Dr. Pfungst couldn't see the movements, either, and he was looking for them. He finally solved the case by putting Hans's questioners out of view and having them ask Hansquestions 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...