Author name: nathan

Your name and role: Alice Chavarot – ‘A’-level Year 12 student and aspiring animal cognition researcher About yourself: My name is Alice Chavarot, and I’m currently studying A-levels at Francis Holland in London. I’m studying Mathematics, Biology, English Literature, and Spanish, with a strong interest in animal cognition, communication, and human–animal relationships. I am particularly fascinated by how scientists can study the minds of non-human animals through careful behavioural research. Article Summary This summer, while at Brown University in Rhode Island, USA, I attended a course on animal psychology taught by PhD students who run the Brown Dog Lab. The experience introduced me to how scientists investigate interspecies cognition through carefully designed behavioural experiments. During the course, I observed how researchers measure animal intelligence through structured tasks rather than assumptions about what animals think or feel. I later participated in this process myself by running cognition activities with my own dog, Winston. The work required careful attention to experimental design, including standardising instructions, recording responses objectively, and resisting the temptation to overinterpret behaviours such as a wag or glance. The experience strengthened my interest in animal cognition research and highlighted how much we still have to learn about how animals perceive and interpret the world around them. Main Article Why I went to Brown in the first place I’ve always been drawn to the question that sits underneath so many everyday moments with animals: what is actually happening in their minds? It’s an easy question to ask and a surprisingly hard one to answer, because “cognition” can mean almost anything. Dogs can seem guilty, birds can seem strategic, and even a snail can appear to learn, but our assumptions are not evidence. That is what made my time with the Brown Dog Lab so exciting. The lab does something that sounds simple but is actually quite difficult: it takes big questions about animals such as: How do they learn? Do they reason? Do they understand us? and turns them into experiments where behaviour can be measured and compared. I arrived at Brown already fascinated by animal cognition and human–animal interaction, and with a growing research background, but I wanted to see what it was like to work in the field. I had previously spent time at Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory in Maine working on CRISPR gene editing in E. coli bacteria, and I had written a research paper on AI decoding whale language (which I hope to publish soon). But Brown was the place where I learned how to think like a researcher: how to explore ideas with curiosity and discipline, and how to frame questions research can actually answer. What the Brown Dog Lab is trying to understand The Brown Dog Lab focuses on canine cognition: how dogs learn, how they solve problems, and how they use social information. The aim is to understand how dogs make sense of the world, both the physical world of objects and puzzles, and the social world of humans and other dogs. The research often looks like short interactive games designed to be engaging for both dog and owner. A dog might need to figure out how to get treats from a container, decide between different options, or respond to social cues such as a human pointing gesture or a demonstration of how something works. What makes it research is that the tasks are carefully structured so that the dog’s behaviour can be recorded systematically. The lab repeatedly returned to one core idea: we cannot measure intelligence directly, but we can infer mental processes from patterns in behaviour if the experiment is designed carefully enough. The first lesson: why careful experimental design matters One of the most important ideas I took away from the course was how easily humans can misread animals. Humans are naturally wired to interpret facial expressions, gestures, and emotions in other people, so we instinctively do the same with animals. Sometimes that helps us connect with them, but sometimes it leads to misleading interpretations. In the lab, you have to work against those instincts. A dog looking away might be distracted, uncertain, stressed, or simply bored. Even behaviours that seem obvious can be deceptive. For example, a wagging tail, often assumed to signal happiness, can also indicate stress or uncertainty. The goal is not to strip animals of emotion or individuality, but to avoid claiming more than the evidence supports. This is why good research relies on controls, standardisation, and where possible, blinding. Blinding means that the person recording the results does not know which outcome they expect to see. If you anticipate a certain result, you might unconsciously give subtle cues such as changes in tone, pauses, or gestures. For dogs, which are highly sensitive to human signals, even small cues can influence behaviour. The second lesson: dogs are excellent social learners Dogs are fascinating subjects because their social world overlaps closely with our own. They live in human homes, attend closely to our faces and movements, and often rely on human guidance to make decisions. This makes them an ideal species for studying interspecies communication. However, it is easy to overinterpret what dogs understand. Dogs can follow pointing gestures, respond to tone of voice, and learn from demonstrations, but this does not necessarily mean they understand situations in the same way humans do. Two dogs might follow a gesture for completely different reasons. One might have learned that pointing predicts a reward, while another might simply be curious about what the human is doing. From the outside, the behaviours look identical. At Brown, I learned to hold two ideas at once: dogs are sophisticated learners, but we must remain cautious about what any single experiment proves about their understanding. What it felt like to become a ‘canine cognition experimenter’ with Winston The most personal part of the experience involved participating in citizen science cognition studies with my own dog, Winston. Winston is a central part of our family life, and bringing him into a research