SQI Seminar Series: Daphna Buchsbaum, Brown University

Title: How Dogs Work With Us: Understanding Attention and Collaboration Across Species

Abstract:
Dogs are familiar companions and working partners, but how do they understand our collaborative interactions? Which features of joint attention are uniquely human, and which also emerge in human-dog partnerships? I will draw on studies of visual exploration, point following, and collaborative search to examine what human-dog coordination reveals about joint attention. Evidence from head-mounted eye-tracking and behavioral tasks shows that dogs actively direct attention in everyday environments, follow human gestures in ways that may differ from young children, and coordinate their looking with their human partner during search. I will also consider how computational simulations could help distinguish possible mechanisms underlying these behaviors. Together, these findings suggest that some behavioral signatures of joint attention extend beyond humans, while raising questions about whether those signatures reveal shared intentions across species and how human-dog coordination might inform human-robot interaction.

Daphna Buchsbaum is an Associate Professor of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. She directs the Computational Cognitive Development Lab, and its sister lab the Canine Cognition Lab. Prior to coming to Brown University, Dr. Buchsbaum was an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, where her research received funding from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI), the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. She was named an Association for Psychological Science Rising Star in 2018. Dr. Buchsbaum completed her postdoctoral work as a Senior Research Fellow in the University of St. Andrews Psychology department, where her research was funded by an ESRC Future Research Leaders grant. Her research has since been funded by She completed her doctoral training the UC Berkeley Psychology department, as well as a master's degree in the UC Berkeley Statistics department, focusing on applications of probability theory and statistical computing. Before that, she completed a master's degree at the MIT Media Lab, working on social learning in interactive animated characters. Dr. Buchsbaum is also a Brown alum, where she received an A.B. in Human Biology.