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This is Scientific Americans 60-Second Science. I'm Jason Goldman.

Let's say you have a dog, or maybe you're watching a friends pup. You have a treat in your hand,

so you have the dog's attention. Then you put the treat into a dog-approved box and let them

figure it out. What do you think the dog will do? If you're a dog owner, you probably know.

Spike or Spot or Miss Fluffy will probably try in vain for a while. But soon they'll probably turn

back to you with those puppy dog eyes, with a look that's both hurt. Why would you make it so hard

for them after all? And pleading. That, it turns out, is a sophisticated cognitive phenomenon

called referential communication. It's an attempt to shift the human's attention towards the problem.

And dogs, as it turns out, aren't the only species who can do this. In 2003, a Hungarian biologist

named Adam McCloshi tested this ability with an experiment. He gathered a handful of dogs and

a group of wolves. Both groups of canines had been hand raised from birth by people in much the

same way. He put a piece of food inside of that dog-approved box. The wolves kept trying and failing

to get the food inside. And we already know what the dogs did. Alan McElegate, an animal cognition

researcher at the City University of Hong Kong, wanted to push this test further. He wanted to

move beyond dogs versus wolves. The discussions of those papers and the discussion and the presses

are all about them being domesticated closely by humans. He thinks that there is more to the story.

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