Sometimes it is by carefully observing the everyday behavior of our dogs that we can gain insight into how they think and act. I was reminded of this when a friend gave me a gift. It was a box set of some of the best episodes of the television show Lassie, which aired from 1950 until about 1970 and follows the adventures of a beautiful collie dog with the different families he meets in a variety of settings and situations.

It was a warm, pleasant afternoon and we had no plans. So I bought my friend a drink and we sat down to watch a random episode. At one point in the episode, a child gets into trouble (as usual). Lassie runs off to get help and in the next scene, Lassie can be seen running towards the child's mother. Lassie looks at her and then turns in the direction of the child. When the mother doesn't seem to understand, Lassie looks at her again, making sure to make eye contact, then barks once before turning in the direction of the child again. Lassie does her thing again, even adding a few steps towards where she wants the mother to go. Eventually, the child's mother does and starts running after Lassie to save her son.

My friend, who is an astute psychologist but doesn't work with dogs (or any other animal besides humans), let out a chuckle and then exclaimed, "It would be nice if dogs could actually do that. What the director is having the dog do is a choreographed dance. He's trying to show us the behavioral equivalent of what a child who can't yet verbalize his needs might do in this kind of situation. It starts with a child trying to get an adult's attention by pointing in the direction he wants the adult to look. But of course, that's beyond the dog's ability. Dogs use communication to tell us how they feel, and while they are good at expressing their feelings (tail wagging, growling, sighing, that sort of thing), they certainly don't engage in referential communication where they might tell us interesting things about our environment, such as where to find a pot of gold – or in this case, a jar of dog biscuits.

I was impressed that my friend was intrigued by the significance of the dog's behavior; however, as I explained to her later, it is true that dogs naturally behave as Lassie did in this episode. It is simply the dog's way of "showing" us what is going on in their world. As far as I can tell, the first scientific discussion of this kind of behavior appeared in the journal Animal Cognition.

The study involved 10 dogs and the setup was fairly simple, in a room that the dogs had been familiarized with. The room contained three bowls scattered in different directions, placed on shelves or other surfaces that were all out of reach of the dogs. A person (someone the dog already knew) would enter the room and hide either a treat or the dog's favorite toy in one of the bowls, then leave the room. The dog's owner would then enter the room with their dog and the researchers would videotape what was happening.

Typically, the dog will exhibit a behavior where it attempts to make eye contact with its owner and, once it has done so, it will look in the direction of the thing that interests it. The sound that some dogs make also seems to have the same meaning as if a person were to say, "Hey! Look over there!" The act of staring at the owner is an effective way for the dog to gain the attention of its owner, which seems to be the equivalent of pointing to the owner.

Of course, it could have simply been dogs staring at something they wanted without any intention of communicating. If that were the case, then the dog would continue to stare at the desired thing even if its owner was not in the room. However, the results of the study showed that the dogs seemed to look in the desired direction much less when their owner was absent. It was mainly in the presence of their owner that the dog's behavior alternated between "staring at the person, then at the thing." One of the interesting aspects of such behavior is that the owner does not have to teach the dog this form of communication. It seems to occur naturally. And humans, without deliberate instruction, seem to recognize the meaning of these actions, responding by looking where the dog is looking.

The reason these behaviors are so common may be due to human intervention. Perhaps during the domestication process, we systematically selected dogs with better communication skills. A dog that can tell us where things are that interest him or that he considers important is a more useful companion and easier to get along with. Dogs that have this ability will be better cared for and are more likely to be selected for breeding. This means that if this behavior is genetically controlled, it will become more common in successive generations of dogs.

In any case, it seems that the sequence of actions we observed in Lassie was not just part of a dance prepared by her trainers, but rather an example of a common way in which dogs "show" us what they consider interesting in their world - the biscuits on the counter, for example!