I let out a sigh and said, “We would need a thousand repetitions to get the SNR up to a reasonable level.” Neither dog nor human would sit still for that long. “That has to be from movement.”
“It is,” Andrew said. “Check this out.” Andrew scrolled through the sequence of McKenzie’s images. This had the effect of creating a movie of her brain. It compressed the five-minute scan session into thirty seconds. Even though we had captured only half of her brain, the movie made clear that although McKenzie had been in the head coil for the whole session, she was still moving. Not much. But just enough to cause artifacts. Callie’s brain movie looked similar.
In fairness to the dogs, they had done what we asked of them. The degree of movement we were talking about was a matter of millimeters. During the stress of the scan session, neither Melissa nor I noticed it. Not that we could have done much about it on the fly.
“Well,” I said, “we have two weeks to train them not to move.”
Andrew looked skeptical.
The dogs would have to move less than two millimeters, but they would have to hold still only during the period from putting their head on the chin rest through the duration of the hand signal. After they got their hot dog, they could take their time swallowing and getting resettled in the chin rest. We needed enough time only for the fMRI signal to reach a peak and begin to decay—roughly ten to fifteen seconds. If the dogs remained motionless for that length of time, we calculated that twenty repetitions might be enough to get the SNR up to a usable level. That still left the structural scan, which we hadn’t been able to obtain on either Callie or McKenzie. That scan would require the dogs to stay motionless for thirty seconds.
Thirty became the magic number. During training, we would have to gradually lengthen the time between the hand signal and the reward until the dogs could hold absolutely still for half a minute. If they could do that, we would be able to get the structural scan and plenty of functional repetitions to boot.
Callie didn’t seem to mind the change in training procedures. At first, I felt a twinge of guilt every time I put up the signal for “no hot dog.” Callie would stare at me impassively from her position in the mock head coil. I’m in the head coil, why no hot dog? Sometimes I would touch her lightly on the top of her head, indicating that I wanted her to try again. But this soon became superfluous.
It seemed cruel to withhold rewards, but I trusted Mark’s advice and stuck to the VR2 training schedule.
Mark was right. After switching to variable reinforcement, Callie really started paying attention. She had no choice. With peas and hot dogs, she got rewarded every repetition, so there was no need to pay attention to what I was doing. Now she noticed every little movement. If my shoulder twitched, Callie’s eyes darted to the side. It was so fast that had we not been staring directly at each other I would never have noticed.
I continued recording our training sessions. With a digital camera on a tripod, I could shoot directly over my left shoulder. Even though Callie and I were staring directly at each other during training, the camera picked up things that I hadn’t noticed in real time. Mark and I reviewed these videos like football coaches on the Monday after game day. He critiqued my technique as we tried to eliminate all of my “tells.” We wanted the dogs to be focused solely on the hand signals. Callie wasn’t the only one who would have to hold perfectly still. So would I. Except for the hand signals, we didn’t want any extraneous body movements.
We amped up the noise training too. Both Callie and McKenzie had reacted negatively to the sudden onset of the shimming and localizer sequences, so we incorporated recordings of those noises into the daily training as well. The more the dogs became accustomed to the sounds, the more comfortable they would be.
We even tried to make positive associations with the noise. I would start playing the scanner noise through the PA and call Callie to the living room. We would wrestle and play tug-of-war while the noise blasted away. Lyra would join in too. It took only a few days before Callie would run to the living room as soon as she heard the scanner noise playing. I would slip on the earmuffs and crank the amp to 95 decibels to give the full effect. She didn’t care. Callie would just trot up the steps into the tube and plop down in the head coil, licking her lips and waiting for hot dogs.
It was during this intense training period that I think our relationship began to change. Rather than master-dog, or dominant-subordinate, we became a team. We were like pitcher and catcher. For lack of a better word, it was intimate.
There is something deeply personal about staring directly into another’s eyes. Humans’ eyes are unique. We have more white in our eyes than any other animal, which means that we can tell with extraordinary precision where other people are looking. One theory says that humans’ eyes evolved this way as a means of nonverbal communication. Using nothing but eye movements, we can, for example, communicate to other people where they should direct their attention. Just as important, we can deduce a great deal about someone’s thought processes just by observing where they are looking. Gazing directly at you? They are definitely interested. Gaze averted or roaming? Not so much.
Under normal circumstances, when I had looked into the eyes of animals, even our beloved pets, I never felt a strong reciprocal connection. Sure, they looked back, but the gulf between species was too great. It was like staring into an abyss with no clue as to what lurked behind those big brown eyes.
Now, eyeball-to-eyeball, I could see my reflection in Callie’s eyes. Yes, she wanted hot dogs, but there was something more. Callie had been communicating with me the whole time. I had been the one who was blind to it. But now that we were staring at each other for minutes on end, there was no ignoring it. Subtleties of expression—how she held her eyebrows, the tension in her ears, the drape of her lips, and, of course, where she directed her eyes—spoke volumes.
Now too late, I realized that Newton had done the same.
As dog trainers have known for a century, dogs are exquisitely sensitive to picking up cues in their environment. Dogs act with a theory of behavior, which is the broad scientific term for saying that dogs learn that certain behaviors lead to certain outcomes. This is the foundation of positive reinforcement. But staring into Callie’s eyes, and watching how she stared back, I began to suspect that she was doing something more. She was noticing where my attention went.
The ability of dogs to track others’ attention has only recently been appreciated. In 2004, researchers in Hungary tested the extent to which dogs used attentional cues from humans. They set up a series of experiments that included different types of fetching tasks that varied the face and body positions of the humans. The researchers wanted to know how dogs reacted to a human when they either faced each other or faced away and whether the visibility of the human’s eyes made a difference. To hide the human’s eyes from the dogs, the person was blindfolded. The researchers found that dogs were sensitive to the human’s attention, but that it depended on the specific context. In tasks that were playlike, the dogs didn’t seem to care whether the human was looking at them, but if the human commanded the task, then the dogs paid close attention to where the human was looking.
The evidence continues to accumulate that not only are dogs sensitive to where humans’ attention is directed, but dogs are also sensitive to the social context. They know when it is appropriate to attend to their human’s attention and when it is not. This means that dogs have more than a theory of behavior. They have a theory of mind.