Does Your Dog Have a Theory of Mind?

"Theory of mind" is the technical name for something most dog owners take for granted: the sense that the creature on the other end of the leash is tracking what you can and can't see, what you do and don't want, where your attention is and isn't. For decades the formal evidence was thin. In the last five years it has filled in remarkably.

The clearest experiments

The Guesser-Knower paradigm pits a human who watched food being hidden against one who didn't. Dogs preferentially beg from the Knower. Variations control for cues the dog could be picking up on accident; the effect survives them.

What it doesn't mean

Dogs probably don't have the full recursive theory of mind humans deploy (knowing that you know that I know). What they appear to have is a robust working model of human attention and intention — enough to make the cooperative tasks dogs do every day make sense from their side of the leash as well as ours.