38 - Angie Johnston: How Studying Dogs (!) Helps Us Understand Human Social Learning

In this episode, Anjie chats with Dr. Angie Johnston, who is currently an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College, where she directs the Canine Cognition Center and Social Learning Laboratory.  Her works take a comparative approach: comparing human learning to domestic dogs’ learning, as a way to examine which aspects of human learning are unique and which are shared among species. In this episode, we are going to talk about one of her recent works that try to answer a question that many dog owners may have: why does my dog sometimes look back at me?

You can check out the paper we discuss here: Johnston, A. M., Chang, L. W., Wharton, K., & Santos, L. R. (2021). Dogs (Canis familiaris) prioritize independent exploration over looking back. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 135(3), 370.

To learn more about Angie’s research, you can visit her personal website and her lab’s website.  She is also on Twitter as @AngieMJohnston

--

We are currently conducting a survey to get to know our listeners better and to collect any feedback and suggestions so we could improve our shows. If you have 1 minute or so, please click the link here to submit your response: https://forms.gle/dzHqnWTptW8pSVwMA. All responses will be anonymous!