I think that's just a need to introduce conciseness to the situation. It's less about comprehension and more about "despite an express general request, the device (in this case, a dog) responds differently in this specific situation, unless receiving a countermanding specific command".
i.e. it's not about cognition, it's about the tool (in this case, the dog) having certain behaviour.
For instance, consider a hypothetical system with pop up dialog boxes requesting confirmation (yes undo is better, etc.). A user hits Del signaling they wish to delete an entry from a list, and a popup is displayed requesting confirmation. The user hits Enter within 10 ms of the appearance of the popup but the system ignores the input. One might describe this as "The program understands that the user did not actually confirm since they did not have sufficient time to do so" and not actually mean "The program acquired sapience within 10 ms and proceeded to overrule the human".
Teaching a dog to not run into traffic, even if ordered to do s (a) is quite doable, and (b) doesn't the dog to have any notion of the assisted person's mindset.
i.e. it's not about cognition, it's about the tool (in this case, the dog) having certain behaviour.
For instance, consider a hypothetical system with pop up dialog boxes requesting confirmation (yes undo is better, etc.). A user hits Del signaling they wish to delete an entry from a list, and a popup is displayed requesting confirmation. The user hits Enter within 10 ms of the appearance of the popup but the system ignores the input. One might describe this as "The program understands that the user did not actually confirm since they did not have sufficient time to do so" and not actually mean "The program acquired sapience within 10 ms and proceeded to overrule the human".