Do Dogs Have Thoughts

Short answer

• Yes, dogs have thoughts, but their thoughts are not like ours. Dogs do not think in words or hold an inner monologue, because they have no language to think with. What peer-reviewed research shows is a mind that learns, remembers, solves problems, reads human faces and voices, and responds to the emotions of the people around it. Brain scans show that a dog's brain reacts to expected rewards, human and dog voices, and happy or unhappy sounds in ways that resemble human brain activity. Experiments show that dogs can recall past events they did not expect to be tested on, tell happy human faces from angry ones, and adjust their behavior according to what a person can see. What science cannot show is what any of this feels like from the inside. A dog's inner experience is real, but it is built from smell, sound, sight, emotion, and memory, not from sentences. The honest answer is that dogs think in impressions, associations, and feelings, and researchers can measure the behavior and the brain activity while the private experience itself stays out of reach.

Introduction

Watch a dog stare at a closed door, nose working, tail still, and the question asks itself. What is going on in there? The question is simple, but the word “thoughts” covers several different things. A thought can be a sentence in your head, a picture you call to mind, a memory that surfaces without words, or a feeling that pushes you toward one choice rather than another. Humans do all of these. Dogs almost certainly do some of them and not others, and sorting out which is which is the work of a young science called canine cognition.

For most of the twentieth century, the study of animal minds was treated with suspicion. Researchers worried that attributing thoughts to animals was unscientific, a trap called anthropomorphism, which means giving human traits to non-human animals. Dogs were often described as creatures of habit, trained by reward and punishment, with little going on between the stimulus and the response. That picture has changed. Over the last twenty years, researchers at universities in Budapest, Vienna, Atlanta, and elsewhere have run controlled experiments, scanned the brains of awake dogs, and tracked how dogs learn words, remember events, and read human gestures. The findings point to a real inner life, one that is different in kind from ours rather than a smaller copy of it.

This article explains what that research actually shows, and where it stops. Every finding here is labeled, in plain terms, as something measured in an experiment or something inferred from behavior. Where researchers disagree, that disagreement is part of the story. The goal is not to tell you what your dog is thinking at any given moment, because no scientist can do that. The goal is to explain how scientists study a mind they cannot ask questions of, and what they have learned so far.

Dogs are also the oldest domesticated animal, and their long history alongside people is part of why their minds work the way they do. For the story of how dogs came to live with humans in the first place, see Where Does the Dog Come From. That shared history shaped a brain that is unusually tuned to human faces, voices, and gestures, and much of the research below is really research into that partnership.

What Counts as a Thought

In everyday speech, thinking usually means the silent sentences in your head. You plan your day, replay a conversation, or argue with yourself about a decision, all in words. Dogs cannot do this, because they have no language. That does not settle the question. It only settles one version of it.

Cognitive scientists use a broader definition. A thought, in this sense, is any internal process that takes in information, holds it, combines it with past experience, and guides what an animal does next. By that definition, remembering where food was hidden is a thought. Recognizing a familiar face is a thought. Deciding to approach one person and avoid another, based on how each behaved earlier, is a thought. None of these need words. They need a brain that can store information and use it, and dogs plainly have that.

There is a third category that sits between these two, and it is the hardest to study. This is conscious experience, the feeling of what it is like to be a dog smelling rain on the pavement or hearing its owner’s key in the door. A scan can show which parts of a brain light up. It cannot show what the lighting up feels like. So when this article says that research shows dogs feel joy or anticipation, that is shorthand. What the research shows is brain activity and behavior that, in humans, goes with joy or anticipation. Whether the dog’s experience matches ours is something science can approach but never fully confirm.

This distinction between measured and inferred runs through the whole subject. A dog choosing a happy face over an angry face on a touchscreen is measured. Saying the dog understands happiness is inferred. A dog’s caudate nucleus activating when it sees a hand signal that means food is measured. Saying the dog feels pleasure is inferred, though the inference is a strong one, because the same brain region behaves the same way in people. Keeping those two apart is what separates careful science from guesswork, and this article keeps them apart throughout.

The Evidence That Dogs Think

The simplest evidence that dogs think is that they learn, and they learn in ways that go beyond simple habit. A dog that has never seen a particular puzzle can work out how to open a latch or find hidden food, sometimes by watching a person do it first. Dogs follow a pointing finger to find food, a skill that sounds trivial until you learn that our closest relatives, the great apes, are worse at it. In early studies, dogs outperformed apes on tasks that used social cues such as pointing, even though apes were better at tasks that used pure logic. That finding, published by Brian Hare and colleagues in Science in 2002, helped launch the modern study of dog cognition, because it suggested that dogs evolved a special sensitivity to human communication.

That sensitivity shows up very early. Puppies only a few weeks old already follow human gestures, which suggests that at least part of this ability is built in rather than taught. Adult dogs read a whole vocabulary of human signals: pointing, looking, nodding, and even the direction of a person’s gaze. They also notice when a person is paying attention to them and when a person is not. In a 2017 study published in Scientific Reports, dogs produced far more facial movements when a human was watching them than when the human turned away, which suggests they adjust their communication according to their audience. That is not proof that dogs know what a person is thinking. It is proof that their behavior is sensitive to human attention, and that is a building block of social thought.

Dogs also solve problems on their own. Given a box with food inside and a mechanism to open it, many dogs will try different approaches, pawing, nosing, and pulling, until one works. They remember the solution and use it again. They can also learn by watching other dogs or people, which is a more advanced skill than learning by trial and error alone. Imitation matters because it shows that a dog can hold a picture of someone else’s action in mind and then reproduce it with its own body.

None of this means dogs reason the way people do. Dogs are poor at some kinds of abstract thinking that come easily to humans, such as working out a multi-step plan. Their strengths are social and practical: reading people, remembering places and routines, and learning what works. Their thinking is tuned to the world they live in, which is a world of people, smells, sounds, and daily routines, not a world of words and numbers.

Inside the Dog Brain

Until recently, studying a dog’s brain meant studying a dead one, or an anesthetized one. That changed in 2012, when Gregory Berns and his team at Emory University trained two dogs to lie still inside a functional MRI scanner while fully awake, without sedation or restraint. The dogs wore ear protection, entered the scanner voluntarily, and held still for the seconds needed to take each image. It was the first time brain scans had been taken of completely awake, unrestrained dogs, and the method opened a new window into the canine mind.

In that first experiment, published in PLOS ONE in 2012, the dogs were shown hand signals from their handler. One signal meant a piece of hot dog was coming. Another meant no food was coming. When the dogs saw the signal for food, a region called the caudate nucleus became active in both dogs. In humans and other primates, the caudate is involved in expecting rewards, and it is rich in dopamine receptors linked to motivation and pleasure. The dogs had learned the meaning of the signals, and their brains reacted to the promise of a reward before the food arrived. That is anticipation, and anticipation is a thought about the future.

The result was later repeated with more dogs. In a follow-up study with 13 dogs, 8 of the 13 showed the same caudate response to the signal for food. That is a meaningful detail, because it shows the effect is real but not universal. Not every dog’s brain responded the same way, and the researchers were open about the small numbers and the fact that only cooperative dogs can be trained for a scanner at all. Brain imaging in dogs is a young method, and its findings are best read as early evidence, not as a finished map of the dog mind.

A second line of brain research looked at how dogs hear us. In 2014, Attila Andics and colleagues at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest scanned 11 dogs and 22 people while they listened to nearly 200 sounds, including dog sounds, human sounds, and ordinary noises such as car horns. The study, published in Current Biology, found that dogs have dedicated voice areas in their brains, in locations similar to the voice areas in human brains. A region near the primary auditory cortex in both species responded more strongly to happy sounds than to unhappy ones, whether the sound came from a dog or a person. That suggests dogs and humans process the emotional tone of voices using similar brain machinery.

There were differences too. In humans, only 3 percent of sound-sensitive brain regions responded more strongly to non-vocal sounds than to voices. In dogs, the figure was 48 percent. Dogs listen to the whole world, not just to voices, and their brains reflect that. A dog’s mind is tuned to a wider soundscape than ours, which fits with how dogs live: alert to footsteps, keys, rustling bags, and distant sounds that a person would never notice.

A third study looked at faces. In 2015, Corsin Muller and colleagues at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna trained 20 dogs to tell happy human faces from angry ones on a touchscreen. To rule out simple tricks, such as the dogs noticing teeth in a smile, the researchers showed only the top half or only the bottom half of each face during training. The dogs still learned the task, and they could apply it to faces they had never seen before, performing better than chance in every test condition. The study, published in Current Biology, was described as the first solid evidence that a non-human animal can discriminate emotional expressions in another species. It does not prove that dogs understand human happiness or anger as feelings. It proves they can tell the expressions apart and learn what each one predicts, which is itself a real cognitive achievement.

Memory: Do Dogs Remember the Past

Memory is where the question of dog thoughts gets most interesting, because memory is the closest thing science has to a window into a dog’s inner life. If a dog can recall a specific event from its past, not just a trained habit, then it has something like the personal memories that humans rely on to make sense of their lives.

The strongest evidence comes from a 2016 study by Claudia Fugazza and colleagues at Eotvos Lorand University, published in Current Biology. The researchers trained 17 dogs in a method called “Do as I Do,” in which a dog watches a person perform an action and then copies it on command. Then they changed the test. The dogs watched a person perform an action, and instead of being asked to copy it, they were trained to lie down. Later, without warning, the researchers gave the command to imitate. The dogs had no reason to expect a memory test, and yet they could recall and reproduce the action they had seen, both after one minute and after one hour. Their performance faded with time, but it was still there after an hour.

This matters because of how the test was designed. The dogs were not rehearsing the action or expecting to be tested. They had simply watched something happen, and later they could bring it back. That is the structure of episodic memory, the kind of memory that lets people recall what happened at a particular time and place. The researchers were careful to call it episodic-like memory rather than episodic memory, because the full human version is tied to self-awareness and a sense of time, and there is no evidence that dogs have those. But the study showed that dogs can store a rich memory of an event and retrieve it unexpectedly, which is more than simple conditioning can explain.

A follow-up study in 2020 strengthened the finding. Dogs were trained to repeat their own actions on the command “Repeat!” and then tested on actions they had performed spontaneously, without being told to remember them. Even up to an hour later, the dogs could recall and repeat what they had done. Together, these studies suggest that a dog’s memory is organized around events and experiences, not just around rewards and punishments.

There are limits to dog memory too. Dogs do not seem to keep the kind of detailed life story that humans do, and their memories fade faster than ours. In the Fugazza study, recall declined noticeably between one minute and one hour. Dogs also appear to remember events without placing them on a timeline. A dog may remember that something happened, but there is no evidence it knows when it happened, or can plan around a future date. Their memory is real, but it is a memory of what, not of when.

Words and Meaning

One of the most striking findings in dog cognition is that some dogs learn words, and not just as sounds to obey. In a 2004 study published in Science, Juliane Kaminski and colleagues reported on Rico, a border collie who had learned the names of hundreds of objects. When asked to fetch an item by name, Rico could pick it out from a group of familiar toys. More remarkably, when given a word he had never heard before, he could work out that it must refer to the one unfamiliar object among familiar ones, a skill called fast mapping that human children also use when learning language.

Later work has both supported and complicated that picture. A 2024 study from the Eotvos Lorand group, published in Current Biology, used EEG, a method that records electrical activity from the scalp, to look at how dogs process words. The researchers spoke a word the dog knew, such as “ball,” while showing the dog an object. Sometimes the object matched the word. Sometimes it did not. In humans, a mismatch triggers a distinct electrical response in the brain known as the N400 effect, which reflects the brain noticing that a word and an object do not belong together. The dogs showed a comparable response. The researchers concluded that hearing a familiar word activates a mental representation of the object it refers to, which is evidence for referential understanding, the idea that a word points to a thing in the world rather than just triggering a behavior.

That does not mean dogs understand language the way people do. Most dogs learn dozens of words at most, not thousands, and they learn them as labels for objects and actions, not as parts of sentences. They do not combine words into new meanings, and they do not understand grammar. The gifted dogs that learn hundreds of words are exceptional, and researchers are still studying what makes them different. A recent proposal from the Budapest group suggests that dogs vary in a general cognitive factor, sometimes called a g factor, similar to the general intelligence factor studied in humans. That idea is new and still being tested, so it should be read as a promising hypothesis rather than an established fact.

The honest summary is that dogs understand some words as referring to things, and that this is a genuine cognitive achievement, but it is a long way from language. A dog that knows the word “ball” has a mental link between a sound and an object. A person who knows the word “ball” also has links to games, rules, memories, jokes, and plans. The dog’s understanding is real and limited at the same time.

Theory of Mind: Do Dogs Know What We Are Thinking

One of the deepest questions in animal cognition is whether an animal can understand that other beings have minds of their own, with thoughts and knowledge that differ from its own. Psychologists call this theory of mind. A child develops it gradually, learning that other people can believe things that are not true, want things the child does not want, and see things the child cannot see. The question is whether dogs have any version of this ability.

The evidence is mixed, and researchers disagree about what it means. On one side, several experiments suggest that dogs track what people can and cannot see, which is part of how dogs read human eyes. In a 2003 study, Call and colleagues found that dogs were more likely to take forbidden food when a person’s eyes were closed than when the person was watching them, which suggests the dogs were responding to whether the person could see them, not just to whether the person was present. In another line of research, dogs performed well on a task called the Guesser-Knower test, in which they had to work out which of two people knew where food was hidden. Dogs also adjust their behavior according to whether a person is watching them, as the facial movement study showed. There is also evidence that dogs can tell whether a human action was deliberate. In a 2021 study, researchers found that dogs reacted differently when a person deliberately withheld a food reward than when the person was unable to give it, for example because she dropped the food or because the gap in the barrier was blocked.

On the other side, the results are not always consistent, and simpler explanations often fit the data. A dog that steals food when eyes are closed might simply have learned that closed eyes mean less chance of being caught, without understanding anything about seeing. A large international study by the ManyDogs consortium, published in 2023, found that dogs did not respond differently to pointing alone versus pointing combined with social cues such as eye contact and calling the dog’s name. That result supports a conditioning-based view, in which dogs follow pointing because they have learned it predicts food, rather than because they understand that pointing is meant to communicate. The field is genuinely divided on this question, and the honest answer is that dogs show some abilities that look like theory of mind, but no experiment has yet settled whether they truly understand other minds or are simply very good at reading behavior.

A related finding is that dogs can use tactical deception, at least in a limited form. A 2017 study published in Animal Cognition found that dogs were more likely to lead a person to an empty food container when that person had previously refused to share food, while leading a cooperative person to the full container. The researchers interpreted this as evidence that dogs can adjust their behavior according to what they have learned about a person. Whether that counts as deception in the human sense, which would need an understanding that the other person holds a false belief, is still debated. What is not debated is that dogs keep track of how individual people behave and use that information in later encounters.

Emotions: What Dogs Feel and What We Imagine

Dogs clearly have emotions, in the sense that they show fear, joy, excitement, and distress, and their bodies and brains respond to emotional events. The harder question is which emotions they have, and how much of what we see is our own interpretation.

The basic emotions are well supported. A dog that cowers at a loud noise is afraid. A dog that greets its owner with a wagging tail and a loose, bouncing body is excited and happy. Brain imaging supports the idea that dogs experience positive emotion: the caudate response to a reward signal, and the response to happy voices, both occur in regions linked to reward and pleasure in humans.

The question gets harder with the more complex emotions, and the best-known example is guilt. Most dog owners have seen the look: lowered head, flattened ears, averted eyes, tail tucked, after the dog has done something forbidden. It looks exactly like guilt. But a landmark 2009 study by Alexandra Horowitz at Barnard College, published in Behavioural Processes, showed that the look tracks the owner’s behavior, not the dog’s. Horowitz set up trials with 14 pet dogs in which owners either correctly or incorrectly believed their dog had eaten a forbidden treat, and then scolded the dog or not. The dogs showed the “guilty” body language based on whether they were scolded, not on whether they had actually eaten the treat. Innocent dogs that were scolded showed just as much guilty-looking behavior as dogs that had eaten the food, and in some conditions the obedient dogs that were scolded unfairly showed the strongest display of all.

Horowitz’s conclusion was careful. She wrote that a better description of the so-called guilty look is that it is a response to owner cues, rather than evidence that the dog understands it did something wrong. Later studies confirmed the pattern, including a 2012 follow-up and a 2015 study of 96 owner-dog pairs, which found that owners could not reliably tell from the look alone whether their dog had broken a rule. That does not prove dogs never feel guilt. Guilt is a self-conscious emotion that needs an understanding of rules and of one’s own past actions, and there is no method yet that could prove or disprove it in dogs. What the research shows is that the guilty look is not evidence of guilt. It is a set of appeasement behaviors, signals that say, in dog language, that the dog means no harm and wants the tension to end.

Dogs also read human emotions, and this is better established than their own complex feelings. The Muller study showed they can tell happy faces from angry ones. Other research has shown that dogs respond to human stress, and that they synchronize their behavior with the people around them. When dogs and children interact, oxytocin, a hormone linked to bonding, rises in both. That finding comes from a 2024 study, and it fits with the broader picture of a species whose emotional life is deeply tied to the people it lives with.

The practical lesson is simple: trust the basic emotions, and be cautious about the complex ones. Joy, fear, excitement, and affection are well supported by behavior and brain science. Guilt, spite, shame, and pride are human concepts that may not map onto a dog’s mind at all. When a dog looks guilty, the safest reading is that it is reacting to your anger, not confessing to a crime.

Do Dogs Dream

Most dog owners have watched a sleeping dog twitch its paws, whimper, or move its legs as if running. It looks like dreaming, and the science supports the idea, with limits. Dogs, like humans, cycle through stages of sleep, including a stage called rapid eye movement sleep, or REM sleep, in which the brain is active and the body is mostly still. In humans, REM sleep is the stage most linked to dreaming. Dogs show the same sleep stages, and their brains show similar patterns of activity during REM sleep.

Researchers infer from this that dogs probably dream, and that their dreams likely replay experiences from their waking lives, such as running, playing, or chasing. That inference is based on studies of brain activity during sleep, including work showing that the brains of sleeping animals replay patterns from waking activity. But the content of a dog’s dreams cannot be known, because a dog cannot report what it experienced. The twitching paws are consistent with dreaming, but they are also consistent with simple muscle activity during sleep. The honest statement is that dogs enter REM sleep and show the brain activity linked to dreaming in humans, which makes dreaming likely, while the content of any dog dream is unknown and unknowable.

What Dogs Probably Do Not Do

Saying what dogs do not do is as important as saying what they do, because the most common mistakes about dog minds come from assuming they work like ours.

First, dogs do not think in words. They have no inner voice, no silent sentences, and no language-based reasoning. Their thoughts are built from sensory impressions, especially smell, and from learned associations and emotional memories. A dog waiting by the door is not thinking, in words, that its owner will be home soon. It is responding to the time of day, the light, the sounds of the street, and a learned pattern that predicts the owner’s return.

Second, dogs do not plan far ahead or dwell on the past in the human sense. They remember events, as the Fugazza studies show, but there is no evidence that they reflect on their memories, regret past choices, or imagine distant futures. They live largely in the present, responding to what is happening now and to patterns they have learned.

Third, dogs do not think in abstract ideas. They do not understand concepts such as fairness in the human sense, or right and wrong as moral rules. They learn what gets rewarded and what gets punished, and they learn what particular people expect of them, but that is not the same as having a moral code. A dog that avoids stealing food when watched has learned a rule about being watched, not a principle about honesty.

Fourth, dogs do not have the kind of self-awareness that humans have. They do not pass the mirror test, the classic experiment in which an animal is marked while asleep and then shown a mirror to see if it investigates the mark on its own body. Dogs generally treat their mirror image as another dog, or ignore it. Alexandra Horowitz designed an olfactory version of the test, published in 2017, which found that dogs can distinguish their own odor from that of other dogs and notice when their own odor has been changed. That suggests a sense of self based on smell, which fits a smell-centered animal, but it is not the same as the visual self-recognition that great apes show, and researchers do not claim that it proves self-awareness.

A Mind Built on Smell

If there is one idea that changes how you see a dog’s mind, it is this: dogs live in a world of smell the way humans live in a world of sight. A human meeting a friend sees a face and hears a voice. A dog meeting the same person takes in a cloud of scent that carries information about identity, health, mood, diet, and where that person has been. Dogs can follow a scent trail that is days old, tell one person from another by smell alone, and detect changes in human body odor linked to stress. Their brains devote far more processing power to smell than ours do.

This has a direct consequence for how we should imagine their thoughts. When we picture a dog thinking, we tend to picture a small human mind, with pictures and words. The reality is closer to a mind that thinks in smells and associations, a mind that knows the world by what it smells like and what happened last time that smell was present. That is why a dog can be so excited by a walk down a familiar street: to us, the street looks the same as yesterday, but to the dog it is a fresh newspaper of scents, full of news about which animals passed by and when.

It also explains a blind spot in the research itself. For decades, almost all studies of dog cognition used visual tests, because humans are visual animals and design visual experiments. A 2020 review noted that less than 2 percent of early studies in the field focused on smell. That means our picture of the dog mind has been built largely through our strongest sense rather than theirs, and the most dog-like parts of their thinking may be the ones we have studied least. The field is now correcting that, with researchers such as Horowitz designing smell-based tests, but the correction is still young.

Why This Matters

Understanding how dogs think matters for more than curiosity. It changes how people live with them. A person who knows that the guilty look is a response to scolding, not a confession, is less likely to punish a dog for something it did hours earlier, which the dog cannot connect to the punishment. A person who knows that dogs remember events but not timelines will understand why a dog can be delighted to see a person it has not seen for months, and also why it cannot be expected to remember a rule it learned once and never practiced. A person who knows that dogs read human faces and voices will understand why a calm voice and a relaxed posture matter more than a long explanation.

It also matters for science. Dogs were the first domesticated animal, and studying how their minds changed as they came to live with people offers clues about how social intelligence evolves. Dogs are not little people, and they are not simple machines. They are a different kind of mind, shaped by thousands of years of living beside us, and the more carefully we study them, the more interesting that mind turns out to be.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do dogs have thoughts?

Yes. Research in canine cognition shows that dogs learn, remember past events, solve problems, recognize human faces and voices, and adjust their behavior according to what people can see and how people have behaved. Their thoughts are not in words, because dogs have no language, but they involve memory, association, emotion, and anticipation. Brain scans show activity in reward-related regions when dogs expect food, and in voice-sensitive regions when they hear emotional sounds.

What do dogs think about all day?

Most likely, dogs think about what is in front of them: food, walks, play, familiar people, other animals, and the smells and sounds of their surroundings. Experiments show they track routines, remember people and places, and pay close attention to human behavior. They do not appear to dwell on the past or plan the future the way people do. Their thinking is present-focused and tied to their senses, especially smell.

Do dogs think in words or pictures?

There is no evidence that dogs think in words, because they have no language to think with. Some researchers suggest dogs may think in sensory impressions, especially smells and images, but this is an inference, not something that can be measured directly. What is measured is that dogs can learn the names of objects and that hearing a familiar word activates a mental representation of the object it refers to. That is a link between a sound and a thing, not an inner voice.

Do dogs remember their owners?

Yes. Studies of episodic-like memory show that dogs can recall specific events and actions after delays of up to an hour, and everyday observation shows that dogs recognize familiar people after much longer separations. They remember people through sight, voice, and especially smell. Their memories are organized around events and associations rather than a timeline, so a dog remembers a person without necessarily knowing how long it has been since they last met.

Do dogs know when they have done something wrong?

There is no good evidence that dogs understand wrongdoing in the human sense. The classic guilty look, with lowered head and averted eyes, was shown in a 2009 study to track whether the owner scolded the dog, not whether the dog had actually broken a rule. The look is best understood as appeasement behavior, a signal that the dog means no harm and wants to defuse tension. Whether dogs feel guilt as an inner emotion is unknown, and current methods cannot settle it.

Do dogs dream?

Probably. Dogs enter REM sleep, the stage linked to dreaming in humans, and show similar brain activity during that stage. Sleeping dogs often twitch, move their legs, and vocalize, which is consistent with dreaming. Researchers infer that dog dreams likely replay waking experiences, but the content of any dream cannot be known, because a dog cannot describe it.

Can dogs understand what humans are thinking?

Partly, and the question is still open. Dogs can tell whether a person can see them, react differently to deliberate and accidental actions, and read human facial expressions and vocal tones. Whether that adds up to a true theory of mind, an understanding that other beings have thoughts of their own, is debated. Some experiments support it and others favor simpler explanations based on learned associations. The safest summary is that dogs are exceptionally good at reading human behavior, while the depth of their understanding is still being studied.

Sources & references

• Only sources actually opened or read first-hand during research for this article are listed. Journal citations give the study; the link given is the page or record actually opened.
• 1. Zara Abrams, "How dogs think," American Psychological Association, Monitor on Psychology, October 1, 2025. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2025/10/how-dogs-think
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