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Well it is not far fetched that they can smell the excitement or anxiety of their owners as they approach the evidence they believe is the correct one?
by tiku 7y ago
Well it is not far fetched that they can smell the excitement or anxiety of their owners as they approach the evidence they believe is the correct one?
- anon9001 7y ago> For scent detection dog handlers, beliefs that scent is present might result in either sufficient inadvertent postural and facial cues so that dogs will respond regardless of the absence of scent I don't know how good dogs are at pose detection, but it's definitely plausible that they can tell when an alert is expected.
- bayesian_horse 7y agoA less subtle cue would be how they treat the "suspect". It's less about the handler's pheromones and more about movement, speech and posture.
- taneq 7y agoThey can probably smell their handler getting interested well before the handler's consciously even aware of it.
- bayesian_horse 7y agoI doubt that, at least in the literal sense of smelling. Dogs can however distinguish behavior patterns in their handlers, because that's mainly how they get rewards and are punished. Both the patterns and the rewards are much more subtle than handlers are generally aware of. A service dog is in some sense the worst case of an overfitting machine learning model you can imagine.