ManyDogs 1: A Multi-lab replication study of dogs' pointing comprehension (pre-registered report) (original) (raw)

To promote collaboration across canine science, address reproducibility 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 preregistering 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 robust—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 preliminary data (N = 61) from a single laboratory on two conditions of a 2-alternative object choice t...