I am standing in a room watching my dog stare at two flower pots while it is cold outside. I am about to get an answer to a burning question, is my puppy a smart girl?
Between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago, dogs were domesticated. According to the latest figures from the Pet Food Manufacturers Association, a third of households in the UK have a dog.
Scientists investigating how dogs think, express themselves and communicate with humans say dogs can teach us about ourselves.
I am at the dog cognition centre at the University of Pompey with Calisto, the flat-coated retriever, and a pocket full of frankfurter sausage to find out how.
Calisto seems to do well on the task, despite the fact that dogs struggle with the idea of object permanence. Sarah Lee is a photographer for The Guardian.
The task resembles the cup and ballgame favored by small-time conmen. A PhD student at the centre, Amy West, placed two flower pots in front of Calisto and appeared to pop something under them. Only one of them contains a delicious treat.
I dropped Calisto's lead when West pointed at the pot under which the sausage was. The puppy is trying to get the correct pot.
This was not a surprise according to Dr Kaminski, who is a reader in comparative psychology at the University of Pompey.
She says that the closest living relative to us is a Chimpanzees. Dogs don't.
She says that domestication appears to be the reason for that, with puppies even younger than Calisto showing the same response, yet wolves do not.
She says that the dogs have been selected to pay attention to the gesturing.
Kaminski asked if dogs and children understood gestures in the same way.
She says that the comparison to other animals and dogs can help shed light on which aspects of human communication are unique.
In the next experiment, Calisto watches as West places cheese under one pot and then empties it. The pots are swapped around by the west.
The idea that a treat has moved with a flower pot is the subject of an experiment.
Kaminski says that they have done this with dogs in a large group.
Calisto picked the correct pot on three of four attempts. Kaminski is cautious. She thinks Calisto could smell the treat because he was too close to the pots.
Many dogs find the experiment difficult, but that has yielded insights. Rico the border collie, a dog with an incredible ability to learn the names of items, was one of Kaminksi's most famous works.
She says she found him on German TV.
Kaminski thought Rico was picking correct objects based on what humans were telling him.
Rico learned the labels of more than 200 items from the spoken word, according to Kaminski. A number of research teams have shown various breeds with the ability.
Kaminski and colleagues launched a project called "Finding Rico" to find other such canines.
Kaminski doesn't expect to find more than 50 dogs that can do this.
Kaminski notes that Rico struggled with the idea of object permanence. Cleverness in canines is complex.
Kaminski said that it's not that we have an Einstein dog in front of us that knows everything. We think that some dogs have a set of skills that make them good at learning labels.
Calisto pulls the puppy dog eyes. Kaminski has found that dogs raise their eyebrows when someone is looking at them, which makes their eyes look bigger. Is it a ploy?
Kaminski thinks that they have some control over that. I don't think they have learned how to modify their face in a way that would get their owner's attention.
Kaminski thinks that the eyebrow movement makes dogs look like infants. She and her team are looking at the movement's meaning for dogs.
Is Kaminski's work changing her view of canine intelligence? She points out that some people think dogs are smarter than a two-year-old child, while others think they are not.
Kaminski says that the truth is somewhere in the middle. We are still at the very beginning of understanding what they understand.
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