Here’s an interesting article about a course being offered by the Harvard Extension School called The Cognitive Dog: Savant or Slacker. What I found intriguing about this is that the course’s creator, Bruce Blumberg, works in animation and began studying his dogs in an attempt to understand their behavior. As a result, students gain the insights of someone who has objectively observed the way dogs behave in real-life situations. Compare this to the view of dogs we gain from observing a movie in which dogs have been trained to do what people want them to do in specific situations. Blumberg is interested creating animations that look and act like real dogs, not representing dogs the way people want them to look and act. Kudos to him.
