![]() ![]() The reasons for dogs’ outstanding abilities in inter-specific communication with humans are thought to depend on dogs’ unique evolutionary history. When compared to their closest living relative, the wolf, dogs performed better even when both species were raised under identical conditions unless wolves received extensive and prolonged training. Dogs demonstrated to be extremely skilful in following this gesture both from a very young age and without the need for any explicit training. ![]() In this task a piece of reward is hidden underneath one of several containers, and afterwards a human indicates the correct container to the dog by e.g. This was demonstrated in a series of studies using the so-called object-choice task. This would be consistent with taking into account the objects’ relevance, without necessarily implying that the dogs understood the human’s state of knowledge.ĭogs are particularly good at understanding human communication, for example they can find hidden food following communicative cues provided by humans. It is also possible that dogs might have indicated the location of the hidden object because they recognised it as the target of the human’s search. These results might suggest that informative motives could possibly underlie dogs’ showing. We propose two non-exclusive explanations. However, the human’s vocal communication and the presence of the object relevant to the human increased the persistency of showing, supporting the hypothesis that the dogs understood the objects’ relevance to the human. ![]() indicating the relevant object or indicating the distractor, established joint attention with the human. The human partner interacted with the dog using vocal communication in half of the trials, and remaining silent in the other half. Therefore, in study 2 the dogs had initial access to both objects, and were expected to indicate only one (relevant or distractor). Another possibility is that dogs’ behaviour was driven by an egocentric motivation to interact with novel targets and that the dogs’ neophila might have masked their helpful tendencies. The dogs mainly directed their behaviour towards the object they had an interest in, but dogs were more persistent when showing the object relevant to the human, suggesting that to some extent they took the humans interest into account. Results showed that it was mainly self-interest that was driving the dogs’ behaviour. In study 1, we assessed whether dogs would abandon an object that they find interesting in favour of an object useful for their human partner, a random novel distractor, or an empty container. Communicating with a helpful motive is particularly interesting because it might suggest that dogs understand the human’s goals and need for information. to inform an ignorant human about a target that is of interest to the human but not to the dog. However, there is currently no evidence that dogs communicate helpfully, i.e. This showing behaviour in dogs is thought to be something dogs use intentionally and referentially. ![]() Dogs also produce signals to direct the attention of humans towards outside entities, a behaviour often referred to as showing behaviour. Dogs’ abilities to use human communicative cues in cooperative contexts outcompete those of other species, and might be the result of selection pressures during domestication. Dogs are particularly skilful during communicative interactions with humans. ![]()
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