Comparative psychology
Inside the dynamics of dog-human relationships
October 14, 2026
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Dr. Valerie Kuhlmeier (left) and Hannah Burrows (right) with canine participant Sadie in the Social Cognition Lab’s testing space.
What shapes the way dogs think and behave? How do their experiences with people influence the decisions they make? And what can the relationship between a dog and a human tell us about how the two learn to communicate, cooperate, and respond to one another?
For pets living with families, service dogs supporting people with disabilities, and police and military dogs working alongside handlers, those relationships are shaped by repeated interactions between two species that have lived closely together for thousands of years.
At the Social Cognition Lab, Queen’s researcher Dr. Valerie Kuhlmeier (Psychology) examines dog-human relationships through developmental and comparative psychology, fields that study how thinking and behaviour develop over time, and how thinking and behaviour compare across species.
“Dogs were overlooked in comparative cognition for years because some researchers thought domestication made them seem less useful to study,” says Dr. Kuhlmeier. “But their long history of evolving alongside humans is exactly what makes them so interesting.”
Nearly 300 dogs have come into the lab for in-person studies, representing a wide range of breeds, training histories, and relationships with people.
Tracking interaction between dogs and people
Those studies include Who’s a Good Dyad?, an ongoing project led by PhD candidate Hannah Burrows that examines how pet dogs and their owners respond to one another. Burrows and the team video-record each dog-human pair, or dyad, throughout the lab session to capture the interaction as it unfolds.
Each session begins with the dog and owner playing with toys. Researchers then place food within the dog’s reach, but the dog must wait for permission to eat it. The owner can use whatever strategies they normally would to prevent the dog from eating the food. Once the task ends, the pair returns to play. Moving from play into a brief conflict and back again lets the team see how both participants behave when the situation becomes tense and what happens afterward.
Sadie waits beside a plate of food during one of the lab activities used to observe how dogs and their owners navigate a shared challenge.
Burrows and the team review the video frame-by-frame. They track whether the owner speaks, gestures, or physically intervenes, while also recording whether the dog watches the person, pursues the food, or disengages. The team looks for patterns in how each responds to the other. When an owner changes their approach, does the dog’s behaviour change? How does the owner respond to what the dog does next? And which combinations of responses help the pair move back toward a more positive interaction?
The team also uses surveys to capture owners’ expectations and preconceptions about their dogs. Pairing that information with the video helps explain why two dog-human pairs may respond differently in similar situations.
“We’re adapting video-based methods used to study interactions between people and applying them to dog-human pairs,” says Burrows. “That lets us get at more fine-grained questions about how dogs and people influence each other moment to moment.”
Expanding canine research through collaboration
To study canine behaviour across larger and more varied populations, Queen’s contributes data collected in Kingston to ManyDogs, an international research consortium that coordinates studies across multiple sites using shared methods. Pooling data from participating labs allows researchers to study more dogs from a wider range of backgrounds than any one lab could reach on its own.
Dr. Kuhlmeier and Burrows review data from the Social Cognition Lab’s canine observation room.
That approach has brought together more than 700 dogs at 20 sites across North America, South America, and Europe to study dog-human social communication. Through ManyDogs, Burrows has connected with researchers beyond Queen’s, including a University of Arizona team she now collaborates with on working-dog research. She is one of three graduate students among the Social Cognition Lab’s 19 trainees, alongside a postdoctoral researcher and 15 undergraduates contributing to its canine and developmental research.
Learning from working-dog partnerships
The lab has also studied working-dog partnerships through a separate survey of more than 500 police and military dog handlers in 18 countries. Their responses gave researchers direct input from people who train and work closely with dogs in professional settings.
The lab’s interest in working dogs began when a now-retired Kingston Police canine handler approached Dr. Kuhlmeier with questions about how research into canine cognition could help inform training for both dogs and people. Similar questions have since come from policing agencies elsewhere in Ontario.
“We really want to know how the two species are working together,” says Dr. Kuhlmeier. “That relationship and their ability to communicate is integral to the safety and welfare of both.”
Service dogs raise related questions about how dogs and people communicate and work together. The longer-term goal is to use this evidence to inform training strategies, while first building the objective science needed to support those applications.
