Have you ever looked at your dog and wondered what he or she was thinking?

Now, researchers at Duke University are asking that same question.

"We wouldn't say we're dog experts, but we're dog lovers," said Vanessa Woods as she played with her dog Tassie.

Woods' husband, Brian Hare, is an assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke. This fall he opened the Canine Cognition Center.

"What we're trying to do is use dogs as a model to find out some of the things about ourselves," Woods said. "How is it that humans got so smart? Was it because we got friendlier or bred for intelligence just like some dogs are bred to be friendly or bred to be good swimmers. We can sort of link what we find out about dog intelligence back to ourselves."

About 300 dogs are already signed up for simple tests. The center would like to get 1,000 eventually.

"We want this lab to be somewhere where the community can come in and really participate in the research," Woods said. "We hope that people's dogs out there can help us find the answers to some of these really fascinating questions."

The answers will come in simple tests. In one of them Research Coordinator Kara Schroepfer puts down two cups and hides a treat under one of them. She then points to it. Most of the time, Tassie goes to the cup.

"It sounds like a really simple test. But what Tassie's doing is he's actually reading Kara's mind," Woods said. "He knows that she knows that he wants the food. And he knows that when she points to the cup that - that's the cup that has the food under it."

"Some of our closest living relatives, one of them being the chimpanzee, they can't do the test. So it's really interesting."

Woods said researchers understand that somewhere in time, dogs changed through time.

"Dogs are really special because they have such a different relationship with humans - one that you don't get with a sheep or a cow and one of them is that they're really good and reading human body language," she said. "That's one of the things that we're interested in is - something about this special relationship that we have with dogs that we can then use to sort of use to identify what happened along the path of domestication."

To get involved e-mail the Duke Canine Cognition Center at: dukedogcognition@gmail.com

Related Links

1. Read the full TIME magazine article on the center.