Literature Searching

Stray Dogs Match Humans

Cimarelli, Giulia, et al. “Free-Ranging Dogs Match a Human’s Preference in a Foraging Task.” Current Zoology, 14 Oct. 2023, doi:10.1093/cz/zoad046.

https://academic.oup.com

I am starting to compile a list of potential studies to use for my own scicomm article. I started my literature search off using Google Scholar, since I am pretty familiar with that. Luckily, I had seen an article on X this week that caught my interest. It was from Guilia Cimarelli's account and discussed free-range dogs (aka stray dogs) and how they utilize humans as a guide to their choices. I typed in a few of these keywords into Google Scholar (free-range dogs, human, decisions) and it popped up!

This study tested dogs living on the streets where each dog was either assigned to be exposed to the human or not. Exposure to the human would require getting the dog's attention and then eating out of a box while the dog was watching. Following their assigned demonstration, the dogs' feeding behaviors were analyzed. The study concluded that stray dogs pay attention to humans, which is a similar behavior exhibited in pet dogs the study explains. These results help us to understand all dogs as intelligent, not just the ones exposed to humans frequently. I could definitely see this study can be converted into a story because it is relevant and written in a way where the complex concepts are already fairly easy to understand! To make it more digestible, I would make the protagonist the researcher.

Humans Can Read Dogs' Emotions

Burza, Laura Brochini, et al. “Reading Emotions in Dogs’ Eyes and Dogs’ Faces.” Behavioural Processes, vol. 202, Oct. 2022, p. 104752, doi:10.1016/j.beproc.2022.104752.

https://www.sciencedirect.com

Other than Google Scholar, I also used my school's online library database. It operates very similarly to Google Scholar, finding millions of journal articles and reviews with keywords. To find another article that tied into the previous one, I used the keywords "dogs AND emotion." From there, I simply clicked an article that interested me. I do not prefer either method of search over the other because I was able to get plenty of results using both.

This study took four different dog emotions and asked people to classify the shown emotion: happy, sad, angry, or fearful. Each participant was asked to classify human emotions with pictures of eyes shortly after as a comparison. The study actually found that humans are very accurate when classifying canine emotions! This is an incredible result because it shows that canine and human displays of emotion are similar, inferring a high level of emotional intelligence in dogs. With a result that readily pertsains to the subtle communication between pet and owner, I think this study would very easily turn into a scicomm article. Different from last suggestion, l however, would make the protagonist the dogs in this instance. This way, the emotions and corresponding display could be written from the dogs' perspectives.

I'm very excited to see where the rest of my literature search takes me and if I decide to select one of these articles!