Posted: Oct 24, 2010 2:26 am
Ihavenofingerprints wrote:This is interesting, there is a nice range of data you provided. I am not convinced simply because dogs are good at guessing when their owners will be home for reasons we may or may not know. The longer into the afternoon the lady stays out of her house, the more likely she is to get home in the next few hours.
I didn't get enough time to read through much of the paper i selected. But i didn't find if they tested whether this dog still had an 85% success rate, even when she starts getting home at 4am in the morning, or only leaving for one hour. Having an 85% success rate when she is going to come home before dinner isn't too impressive.
This was exactly the problem that I (and I think Wiseman et al. in the papers provided by Jerome) had with the "experiment". I think there was at most a 4 hour time window with which the owner would return and these were the similar every day. This 4hour time window is also shortened by the fact that from the time that she left the house the shortest time that she would return was 85 minutes, and the longest was 220 minutes - so when the left the house, the dog knew that within about 2hours she should be home. From the paper:
Seven of PS absences were in the daytime, at various times in the morning and
afternoon, with PS's times of return ranging from 11:13 AM to 3:36 PM. Twenty-three were in
the evening, with PS returning at a range of times between 7:30 and 10:45 PM.
And given that the increase in the dog's behavior began before she even decided to come home, then the dog clearly was not psychic.