where he founded the Duke Canine Cognition Center. Vanessa Woods is a research scientist at the Center as well as an award-winning journalist and the author of Bonobo Handshake. Hare and Woods are married and live in North Carolina. They are the authors of Survival of the Friendliest and The Genius of Dogs.
They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, Puppy Kindergarten: The New Science of Raising a Great Dog, and reported the following:
Sadly, page 99 is one of the very few pages that does not have a puppy photo, or even mention a puppy!!Visit Brian Hare's website and Vanessa Woods's website.
It does distill a hotly debated, poorly understood, and complicated subject into a few paragraphs – how cognition and temperament fit into personality. The most helpful line I read when trying to wrestle with this topic was as psychologist David Rettew described it; if your personality is a symphony, your temperament is the key in which the symphony is played.
If I could, I would make it ‘the page 100 test’ because rapidly on the heels of page 99 comes one of my favorite tests with puppies—how they react to toy robots. Basically, we introduce puppies to various life-sized robots, some of whom dance and sing, and record what happens.
It’s a classic temperament test; psychologists have conducted similar tests with children for decades. Since your temperament is with you from a very young age and remains relatively stable, your reaction to something surprising and new when you are young can predict, to some extent, what you will be like when you get older.
We want to see if the same is true for puppies. Some puppies are friendly and kind to the robot, maybe making a deep play bow and sniffing its bottom. Other puppies are alarmed and confused and quickly ask to leave.
Watching the different puppies react to the robot and pairing this with their cognition emphasizes how each puppy is unique. This is probably one of my favorite lessons in our book - that just like kids, puppies all see the world and solve problems differently.
The Page 99 Test: The Genius of Dogs.
The Page 99 Test: Survival of the Friendliest.
--Marshal Zeringue
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