This is Scientific Americans, 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Hocken.

Ever get the feeling that your cat is judging you?

Well, you're in for a surprise, because it's actually your pooch who might be viewing

you with a critical eye. That's according to a study that shows

that dogs can assess human aptitude and will look toward people who seem to know what

they're doing. The work appears in the journal, behavioral processes.

Our aim was to test whether dogs are sensitive to humans' competence levels and whether

they evaluate humans on this tree. Hitomi Chi-jiwa is an assistant professor at Osaka

University. If critiquing people's proficiency seems an odd job for a pup, it may not be

all that far-fetched. K9s have spent more than 10,000 years by our sides.

So, dogs are highly sensitive to human behavior.

And they pay particular attention to things like how cooperative we are.

For example, our previous studies showed the dogs avoid people who refuse to help their

owner.

So, Chi-jiwa and her colleagues got to wondering whether dogs might also rate us in terms

of our skillfulness, particularly if those skills might come in handy for our four-footed

little friends. So, they set up a simple experiment.

We showed 60 dogs, 2% manipulating transparent containers. One person is competent.

That person was able to pop open the top after just a couple of twists.

Whereas the other person is incompetent and they failed at this task.

That person tried to open the lid and then gave up.

And the actors repeated the performance on a second container, with the same results.

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