Assistant Professor
McGuinn Hall 506
Telephone: 617-552-6452
Email: angie.johnston@bc.edu
PSYC3362 Mind of a Dog: How Canine Cognition Informs Human Psychology
Angie Johnston's work investigates the origins of human teaching and learning by comparing human learning to that of domesticated dogs. To address these questions, she works with children and pet dogs from the local community to pinpoint which aspects of human learning are unique and which are shared. She also works with dingoes in Australia to explore how domestication has shaped these traits.
Johnston, A. M., Sheskin, M., & Keil, F. C. (2019). Learning the relevance of relevance and the trouble with truth: Evaluating explanatory relevance across childhood. Journal of Cognition and Development.
Johnston, A. M., Huang, Y., & Santos, L. (2018). Dogs do not demonstrate a human-like bias to defer to communicative cues. Learning & Behavior, 46(4), 449-461.
Johnston, A. M., Byrne, M., & Santos, L. R. (2018). What is unique about shared reality? Insights from a new comparison species. Current Opinion in Psychology, 23, 30-33.
Johnston, A. M., Sheskin, M., Johnson, S. G. B., & Keil, F. C. (2018). Preferences for explanation generality develop early in biology, but not physics. Child Development, 89(4), 1110-1119.
Johnston, A. M., Holden, P., & Santos, L. (2017). Exploring the evolutionary origins of overimitation: A comparison across domesticated and non-domesticated canids. Developmental Science, 20(4), e12460.
Johnston, A. M., Turrin, C., Watson, L., Arre, A. M., & Santos, L. R. (2017). Uncovering the origins of dog-human eye contact: Dingoes establish eye contact more than wolves, but less than dogs. Animal Behaviour, 133, 123-129.
Johnston, A. M., Johnson, S. G. B., Koven, M. L., & Keil, F. C. (2017). Little Bayesians or little Einsteins? Probability and explanatory virtue in children鈥檚 inferences. Developmental Science, 20(6), e12483.
Johnson, S. G. B., Johnston, A. M., Koven, M. L., & Keil, F. C. (2017). Principles used to evaluate mathematical explanation. In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 612-617).
Johnston, A. M., McAuliffe, K., & Santos, L. R. (2015). Another way to learn about teaching: What dogs can tell us about the evolution of pedagogy. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 38, e44.
Johnston, A. M., Mills, C., & Landrum A. (2015). How do children weigh competence and benevolence when deciding whom to trust? Cognition, 144, 76-90.
Johnston, A. M., Johnson, S. G. B, Koven, M. L., & Keil, F. C. (2015). Probabilistic versus heuristic accounts of explanation in children: Evidence from a latent scope bias. In Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1021-1026).
Johnson, S. G. B, Johnston, A. M., Toig, A. E., & Keil, F. C. (2014). Explanatory scope informs causal strength inferences. In Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2453-2458).
Landrum, A., Mills, C., & Johnston, A. M. (2013). When do children trust the expert? Benevolence information influences children鈥檚 trust more than expertise. Developmental Science, 16, 622-638.