About

Andrew Johnston is an associate professor of Classics and (by courtesy) of History at Yale University. He is an ancient historian whose primary research interests lie in Roman cultural history, focusing on questions of memory, identity, cultural interaction, and the representation of selves and others both at Rome and on the peripheries of the ancient Classical world. Johnston studied at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, earning a B.A. in Classics and History in 2006, and completed his Ph.D. in Ancient History at Harvard University in 2012. His work includes the publication of his first book, The Sons of Remus: Identity in Roman Gaul and Spain, which examines the experiences, memories, discourses, and cultural negotiations of local communities and individuals in the Roman West provinces. The book explores the stories of the other side of Empire and has received awards such as the First Book Award from the Classical Association of the Middle West and South and the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit from the Society for Classical Studies. Johnston is currently working on a book titled Regnum: the Fear of Kingship in Roman Culture, which investigates the place of kingship in the Roman imagination from the middle Republic into late Antiquity. In addition to his research, Johnston has written extensively on Roman history and epigraphy, especially on the intersection of Greek culture and the Roman empire. His interests extend to Roman archaeology and material culture. He serves as the Director of the Field School for the excavations of the Gabii Project near Rome and is the Assistant Director of the City of the Baboon Project excavating at Hermopolis Magna in Egypt. Johnston is actively involved in teaching courses related to Latin inscriptions, Roman history, and the late Republic, contributing to the academic community through his research, excavations, and publications.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Medicine
• Political Science
• Cognitive psychology
• Medical education
• Mathematics
• Risk analysis (engineering)
• Applied psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Marketing
• Engineering
• Environmental health
• Social psychology
• Business
• Biology

Selected publications

• Language learning in canines and toddlers: Shared origins?

  Journal of Experimental Psychology Animal Learning and Cognition · 2026-05-11

  articleSenior author

  Dror et al. (2026) report that a subset of dogs identified as Gifted Word Learners successfully learn novel object labels through overheard speech, similar to human toddlers in prior work. In this piece, we review parallels between the canine and toddler findings while also highlighting important questions raised by this work that need to be addressed prior to concluding common evolutionary origins of language learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Dogs (Canis familiaris) copy-all refine-later where children (Homo sapiens) overimitate.

  Journal of comparative psychology · 2025-07-31 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Overimitation is a social learning mechanism in which an observer replicates the actions of a communicative demonstrator even if some of the actions in the process are functionally irrelevant. While many consider overimitation a uniquely human mechanism, some scholars have hypothesized that domestic dogs may overimitate because of their shared evolutionary history and pedagogical learning structures with humans. Previous literature has presented conflicting evidence regarding the presence of overimitation in domestic dogs. This study expanded upon work by Johnston et al. (2017) and directly compared 3- to 5-year-old children and domestic dogs on the same overimitation task. For both dogs and children, we demonstrated an irrelevant action followed by a relevant action and examined how often subjects reproduced this sequence across four trials. Consistent with an overimitation pattern, children reproduced the irrelevant then relevant sequence at a constant rate across four trials. However, dogs decreased the rate with which they reproduced this sequence across trials-a change which is consistent with a copy-all refine-later strategy or simple exploration. These findings support those in Johnston et al.'s (2017) study and further support the hypothesis that dogs do not overimitate like children. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Synchronous citizen science with dogs

  Animal Cognition · 2024-07-06 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Citizen science approaches have grown in popularity over the years, partly due to their ability to reach a wider audience and produce more generalizable samples. In dogs, these studies, though, have been limited in their controls over materials or experimental protocols, with guardians typically reporting results without researcher supervision. Over two studies, we explored and validated a synchronous citizen science approach. We had dog guardians act as experimenters while being supervised by a researcher over Zoom. In study 1, we demonstrated that synchronous citizen science produced equivalent levels of performance to in-lab designs in a choice task. Consistent with past in-lab research, dogs selected a treat (vs. an empty plate) in a two-alternative forced-choice task. In study 2, we showed that Zoom methods are also appropriate for studies utilizing looking time measures. We explored dogs' looking behaviors when a bag of treats was placed in an unreachable location, and dogs' guardians were either attentive or inattentive while dogs attempted to retrieve the treats. Consistent with past work, dogs in the attentive condition looked at their guardian for longer periods and had a shorter latency to first look than dogs in the inattentive condition. Overall, we have demonstrated that synchronous citizen science studies with dogs are feasible and produce valid results consistent with those found in a typical lab setting.

  PublisherDOI

• Still face in pet dogs (Canis familiaris).

  Journal of comparative psychology · 2024-02-15 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  = 60), we included one condition of continuous physical contact, and one condition that was a direct replication of the initial study without physical contact. Similar to human infants, we found a significant decrease in looking from the Interaction phase to the Still Face phase. However, in contrast to human infants, re-engagement and stress behaviors were higher in the Interaction phase than the Still Face phase. Looking and re-engagement behaviors differed based on the condition, with a smaller difference between phases in the Petting condition. These results suggest that dogs are capable of perceiving these small changes in human affect. However, unlike human infants, dogs seem to have greater expectations about physical interactions than verbal interactions, as they reacted more strongly to an Interaction phase without physical contact than the Still Face. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• ManyDogs 1: A Multi-Lab Replication Study of Dogs’ Pointing Comprehension

  Animal Behavior and Cognition · 2023-08-01 · 16 citations

  articleOpen access

  To promote collaboration across canine science, address replicability issues, and advance open science practices within animal cognition, we have launched the ManyDogs consortium, modeled on similar ManyX projects in other fields. We aimed to create a collaborative network that (a) uses large, diverse samples to investigate and replicate findings, (b) promotes open science practices of pre-registering hypotheses, methods, and analysis plans, (c) investigates the influence of differences across populations and breeds, and (d) examines how different research methods and testing environments influence the robustness of results. Our first study combines a phenomenon that appears to be highly reliable—dogs’ ability to follow human pointing—with a question that remains controversial: do dogs interpret pointing as a social communicative gesture or as a simple associative cue? We collected data (N = 455) from 20 research sites on two conditions of a 2-alternative object choice task: (1) Ostensive (pointing to a baited cup after making eye-contact and saying the dog’s name); (2) Non-ostensive (pointing without eye-contact, after a throat-clearing auditory control cue). Comparing performance between conditions, while both were significantly above chance, there was no significant difference in dogs’ responses. This result was consistent across sites. Further, we found that dogs followed contralateral, momentary pointing at lower rates than has been reported in prior research, suggesting that there are limits to the robustness of point-following behavior: not all pointing styles are equally likely to elicit a response. Together, these findings underscore the important role of procedural details in study design and the broader need for replication studies in canine science.

  PublisherDOI

• Gaze in cats (Felis catus) and dogs (Canis lupus familiaris).

  Journal of comparative psychology · 2023-07-31 · 2 citations

  article

  ). In this study, we compare the gaze duration to owners of cats and dogs in a community science setting. We replicated previous gaze studies with dogs, wolves (Nagasawa et al., 2015), and dingoes (Johnston et al., 2017), requesting owners to sit with their pets for 5 min and interact as they normally would. Cats and dogs gazed at their owners for similar durations, but durations of petting and physical contact were significantly lower with cats. Gaze correlated significantly with vocalizations in dogs; however, no other correlations were significant. Dogs gazed less in our community science setting than dogs tested previously in-lab (Nagasawa et al., 2015). Ultimately, cats resemble dogs in their general gaze patterns, but not in most interactions with their owner. Future research should aim to include feral cats or wild cat species to shed light on gaze behavior development in the genus, while more community science work can identify the behaviors that shift for dogs between familiar and unfamiliar environments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Pet dogs (Canis familiaris) re-engage humans after joint activity

  Animal Cognition · 2023-04-13 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Joint intentionality, the mutual understanding of shared goals or actions to partake in a common task, is considered an essential building block of theory of mind in humans. Domesticated dogs are unusually adept at comprehending human social cues and cooperating with humans, making it possible that they possess behavioral signatures of joint intentionality in interactions with humans. Horschler and colleagues (Anim Behav 183: 159-168, 2022) examined joint intentionality in a service dog population, finding that upon interruption of a joint experience, dogs preferentially re-engaged their former partner over a passive bystander, a behavior argued to be a signature of joint intentionality in human children. In the current study, we aimed to replicate and extend these results in pet dogs. One familiar person played with the dog and then abruptly stopped. We examined if dogs would preferentially re-engage the player instead of a familiar bystander who was also present. Consistent with the findings of Horschler and colleagues (Anim Behav 183: 159-168, 2022), pet dogs preferentially gazed toward and offered the toy to the player significantly more than the familiar bystander. However, no difference was observed in physical contact. These findings provide preliminary evidence for behavioral signatures of joint intentionality in pet dogs, but future work is needed to understand whether this phenomenon extends to other contexts.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Working Dog Training for the Twenty-First Century

  Frontiers in Veterinary Science · 2021 · 61 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Psychology
  • Medical education

  Dogs are trained for a variety of working roles including assistance, protection, and detection work. Many canine working roles, in their modern iterations, were developed at the turn of the 20th century and training practices have since largely been passed down from trainer to trainer. In parallel, research in psychology has advanced our understanding of animal behavior, and specifically canine learning and cognition, over the last 20 years; however, this field has had little focus or practical impact on working dog training. The aims of this narrative review are to (1) orient the reader to key advances in animal behavior that we view as having important implications for working dog training, (2) highlight where such information is already implemented, and (3) indicate areas for future collaborative research bridging the gap between research and practice. Through a selective review of research on canine learning and behavior and training of working dogs, we hope to combine advances from scientists and practitioners to lead to better, more targeted, and functional research for working dogs.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Dogs (Canis familiaris) prioritize independent exploration over looking back.

  Journal of comparative psychology · 2021-08-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  It has been suggested that over the course of domestication, dogs developed the propensity to "look back" or gaze at humans when they encounter a challenging task. Unfortunately, little work to date has addressed the question of why dogs look back. To explore this issue, we conducted 3 experiments in which dogs had the option of doing something other than looking back at their owner when encountering an unsolvable task. In Experiments 1 and 2, dogs could look back or attempt an alternative puzzle. In both experiments, dogs attempted the alternative puzzle prior to looking back. In Experiment 3, when dogs encountered the unsolvable task, they could look back or attempt to solve the same puzzle using an alternate approach. As in Experiments 1 and 2, dogs attempted the alternate approach prior to looking back. Although some scholars have suggested that dogs may look back because they are overly reliant on humans, our findings suggest that dogs may instead prioritize independent exploration over looking back. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• What’s the point? Domestic dogs’ sensitivity to the accuracy of human informants

  Animal Cognition · 2021 · 24 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Psychology
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Laurie R. Santos

  10 shared

• Frank C. Keil

  Yale University

  8 shared

• Daphna Buchsbaum

  Brown University

  7 shared

• Emily E. Bray

  7 shared

• Samuel G. B. Johnson

  University of Waterloo

  6 shared

• Asheley R. Landrum

  Arizona State University

  6 shared

• Madeline H. Pelgrim

  Providence College

  6 shared

• Michael Bogese

  Boston College

  5 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Psychology

  Yale University

  2018

• M.Phil, Psychology

  Yale University

  2015

• M.S., Psychology

  Yale University

  2015

• BA, Psychology

  University of Texas at Dallas

  2012

• BS, Child Learning and Development

  University of Texas at Dallas

  2012

Awards & honors

• First Book Award (2019) from the Classical Association of th…
• Charles J.. Goodwin Award of Merit (2019) from the Society f…