Can dogs tell the difference between oops and gotcha?

Research published in Scientific Reports suggests dogs understand the difference between humans’ deliberate and accidental acts, but Clive Wynne, director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University, says the conclusion is premature. Dogs in the study waited when a researcher passing food through a gap in a partition appeared to drop the food accidentally, but they came around the partition quickly to get food that the researcher appeared to withhold deliberately, says study leader Juliane Brauer, head of the dog studies lab at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.