Angie Johnson, PhD

Angie Johnston is an assistant professor at Boston College where she directs the Canine Cognition Center and Social Learning Laboratory. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Yale University and her B.S. in Child Development from the University of Texas at Dallas. Her research on canine cognition and child development has received numerous awards from sources such as the National Science Foundation, and her work has been featured on NBC Nightly News, the Today Show, and Scientific American. When she's not in the lab investigating how dogs and children learn about the world around them, you can find her at home getting new study ideas from her dogs, Vader, Finley, and Scout.

In her research, she investigates the evolutionary origins of human teaching and learning. In earlier work, she approached this question from a developmental perspective, examining how children evaluate the information they learn from others. In more recent work, she has investigated this question from a comparative perspective, examining which aspects of human learning are unique and which are shared across other species. In particular, she compares human learning to that of domesticated dogs, as dogs demonstrate striking similarities to humans in their capacity to learn from others.