Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know is a book written by cognitive scientist, Alexandra Horowitz. Horowitz walks the reader through the cognitive process of dogs in relation to how they perceive their day-to-day activities. [1] The author explains the animal's cognitive abilities, and allows the reader insight into what it might be like to be a dog. The book also contains a brief interview with the author.
Horowitz' approach is based on biosemiotic theory of Jakob von Uexküll on umwelten or the subjective worlds of animals. She writes about revolutionary impact of Uexküll to animal behaviour studies: "anyone who wants to understand the life of an animal must begin by considering what he called their umwelt: their subjective or 'self-world'" (Horowitz 2010, p. 20).
Alexandra Horowitz lives in New York with her husband and son. She has a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in cognitive science from the University of California, San Diego. Before her scientific career, Horowitz worked as a lexicographer at Merrian-Webster and served on the staff of The New Yorker. Horowitz presently teaches psychology at Barnard College, Columbia University. Since Inside of a Dog was published in 2009, she has written four additional books for general readers. [2] [3] [4]
Inside of a Dog has been extensively reviewed, [5] [6] was Number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, and remained on the list for 64 weeks. [7]
Joanna Cole was an American author of children's books, best known as the author of the Magic School Bus series, which sold more than 93 million copies in 13 countries. She wrote more than 250 books, ranging from her first book Cockroaches to her famous series Magic School Bus, which is illustrated by Bruce Degen.
Jakob Johann Freiherr von Uexküll was a Baltic German biologist who worked in the fields of muscular physiology and animal behaviour studies and was an influence on the cybernetics of life. However, his most notable contribution is the notion of Umwelt, used by semiotician Thomas Sebeok and philosopher Martin Heidegger. His works established biosemiotics as a field of research.
Dog intelligence or dog cognition is the process in dogs of acquiring information and conceptual skills, and storing them in memory, retrieving, combining and comparing them, and using them in new situations.
An umwelt is the specific way organisms of a particular species experience the world, which is dependant on what their sensory organs and perceptual systems can detect and interpret.
Jon Katz is an American journalist, author, and photographer. He was a contributor to the online magazine HotWired, the technology website Slashdot, and the online news magazine Slate. In his early career as an author he wrote a series of crime novels and books on geek subculture. More recent works focus on the relationship between humans and animals.
Shiloh is a Newbery Medal-winning children's novel by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor published in 1991. The 65th book by Naylor, it is the first in a quartet about a young boy and the title character, an abused dog. Naylor decided to write Shiloh after an emotionally taxing experience in West Virginia where she encountered an abused dog.
Stanley Coren is a psychology professor, neuropsychological researcher and writer on the intelligence, mental abilities and history of dogs. He works in research and instructs in psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia. He writes for Psychology Today in the feature series Canine Corner.
Emotion is defined as any mental experience with high intensity and high hedonic content. The existence and nature of emotions in non-human animals are believed to be correlated with those of humans and to have evolved from the same mechanisms. Charles Darwin was one of the first scientists to write about the subject, and his observational approach has since developed into a more robust, hypothesis-driven, scientific approach. Cognitive bias tests and learned helplessness models have shown feelings of optimism and pessimism in a wide range of species, including rats, dogs, cats, rhesus macaques, sheep, chicks, starlings, pigs, and honeybees. Jaak Panksepp played a large role in the study of animal emotion, basing his research on the neurological aspect. Mentioning seven core emotional feelings reflected through a variety of neuro-dynamic limbic emotional action systems, including seeking, fear, rage, lust, care, panic and play. Through brain stimulation and pharmacological challenges, such emotional responses can be effectively monitored.
Anecdotal cognitivism is a method of research using anecdotal, and anthropomorphic evidence through the observation of animal behaviour.
A Dog's Life: The Autobiography of a Stray is a children's novel written in 2005 by Ann M. Martin and is published by Scholastic Books. The target audience for this book is grades 4–7. It is written from the first-person perspective of a female stray dog named Squirrel. Ann M. Martin bases her books on personal experiences and contemporary problems or events.
Animal consciousness, or animal awareness, is the quality or state of self-awareness within an animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself. In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.
Colin Dayan, also known as Joan Dayan, is Professor Emerita, the Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, where she teaches American studies, comparative literature, and the religious and legal history of the Americas.
Lad: A Dog is a 1919 American novel written by Albert Payson Terhune and published by E. P. Dutton. Composed of twelve short stories first published in magazines, the novel is based on the life of Terhune's real-life Rough Collie, Lad. Born in 1902, the real-life Lad was an unregistered collie of unknown lineage originally owned by Terhune's father. Lad's death in 1918 was mourned by many of the story's fans, particularly children.
Alice Crary is an American philosopher who currently holds the positions of University Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Faculty, The New School for Social Research in New York City and Visiting Fellow at Regent's Park College, University of Oxford, U.K..
A Dog's Purpose is a 2010 novel written by American author W. Bruce Cameron. It chronicles a dog's journey through four lives via reincarnation and how he looks for his purpose through each.
Barbara N. Horowitz, M.D., is a cardiologist, academic and author. She is a professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiology at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and a visiting professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and has been on the faculty of Harvard Medical School since 2020. Horowitz is a New York Times bestselling author of the book Zoobiquity on the subject of a cross-species approach to medicine which includes veterinary and evolutionary perspectives. In 2019, Horowitz and Bowers co-authored their second book, Wildhood.
Zoobiquity is a 2012 non-fiction science book co-written by the cardiologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers. It was a New York Times Bestseller.
Theory of mind in animals is an extension to non-human animals of the philosophical and psychological concept of theory of mind (ToM), sometimes known as mentalisation or mind-reading. It involves an inquiry into whether non-human animals have the ability to attribute mental states to themselves and others, including recognition that others have mental states that are different from their own. To investigate this issue experimentally, researchers place non-human animals in situations where their resulting behavior can be interpreted as supporting ToM or not.
Brian Hare is a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University. He researches the evolution of cognition by studying both humans, our close relatives the primates, and species whose cognition converged with our own. He founded and co-directs the Duke Canine Cognition Center.
Alexandra Horowitz is a Senior Research Fellow and Adjunct Associate Professor within the English and Psychology Departments at Barnard College. Horowitz is the director of the Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know.