Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) are sensitive to the attentional state of humans (original) (raw)
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Selective attention to humans in companion dogs, Canis familiaris
Animal Behaviour, 2010
Canis familiaris dog dog ageing dogehuman relationship social attention Integration into human societies requires dogs to express adaptable social attitudes, involving high levels of attention to other individuals. In the present study, we developed a new behavioural test, to characterize selective attention towards humans. In the task, the dogs were exposed to the owner and an unfamiliar person, repeatedly entering the experimental room and leaving through different doors; at the end of the sequence the dogs were allowed to approach the doors. Attention was measured as the average length of gaze bouts and as the overall duration of visual orientation towards the different targets. Dogs gave preferential attention to the owner, who received longer gaze bouts and greater overall attention than the stranger. The preference was confirmed by the significant proportion of dogs that directed attention to the owner's door at the end of the task. A modified version of the task was employed to measure dogs' attention when the person's head was not visible. This condition caused a decrease in attention parameters towards the owner. To determine the effects of old age on attention, the two tasks were then administered to dogs aged 7 years and older. Compared to adults, aged dogs showed lower owner-directed attention when the owner was not in sight and were more likely not to move at the end of the task. The results provide the first evidence that dogs' interspecific attention depends on the nature of the dogehuman relationship, on the availability of some distinctive features of the social stimulus and on the age of the dog. Ó
Dogs respond appropriately to cues of humans’ attentional focus
Behavioural Processes, 2004
Dogs' ability to recognise cues of human visual attention was studied in different experiments. Study 1 was designed to test the dogs' responsiveness to their owner's tape-recorded verbal commands (Down!) while the Instructor (who was the owner of the dog) was facing either the dog or a human partner or none of them, or was visually separated from the dog. Results show that dogs were more ready to follow the command if the Instructor attended them during instruction compared to situations when the Instructor faced the human partner or was out of sight of the dog. Importantly, however, dogs showed intermediate performance when the Instructor was orienting into 'empty space' during the replayed verbal commands. This suggests that dogs are able to differentiate the focus of human attention. In Study 2 the same dogs were offered the possibility to beg for food from two unfamiliar humans whose visual attention (i.e. facing the dog or turning away) was systematically varied. The dogs' preference for choosing the attentive person shows that dogs are capable of using visual cues of attention to evaluate the human actors' responsiveness to solicit food-sharing. The dogs' ability to understand the communicatory nature of the situations is discussed in terms of their social cognitive skills and unique evolutionary history.
Journal of comparative psychology (Washington, D.C. : 1983), 2006
Sixteen domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) were tested in a familiar context in a series of 1-min trials on how well they obeyed after being told by their owner to lie down. Food was used in 1/3 of all trials, and during the trial the owner engaged in 1 of 5 activities. The dogs behaved differently depending on the owner's attention to them. When being watched by the owner, the dogs stayed lying down most often and/or for the longest time compared with when the owner read a book, watched TV, turned his or her back on them, or left the room. These results indicate that the dogs sensed the attentional state of their owners by judging observable behavioral cues such as eye contact and eye, head, and body orientation.
Clever hounds: social cognition in the domestic dog (Canis familiaris)
Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 2003
This paper reviews the reasons why domestic dogs make good models to investigate cognitive processes related to social living and describes experimental approaches that can be adopted to investigate such processes in dogs. Domestic dogs are suitable models for investigating social cognition skills for three broad reasons. First, dogs originated from wolves, social animals that engage in a number of co-operative behaviours, such as hunting and that may have evolved cognitive abilities that help them predict and interpret the actions of other animals. Second, during domestication dogs are likely to have been selected for mental adaptations for their roles in human society such as herding or companionship. Third, domestic dogs live in a human world and ''enculturation'' may facilitate the development of relevant mental skills in dogs. Studies of social cognition in animals commonly use experimental paradigms originally developed for pre-verbal human infants. Preferential gaze, for example, can be used as a measure of attention or ''surprise'' in studies using expectancy violation. This approach has been used to demonstrate simple numerical competence in dogs. Dogs also readily use both conspecific and human social signals (e.g. looking or pointing) as information sources to locate hidden rewards such as food or favourite toys. Such abilities make dogs particularly good models for investigating perspective-taking tasks, where animals are required to discriminate between apparently knowledgeable and apparently ignorant informants. #
Verbal Attention Getting as a Key Factor in Social Learning Between Dog (Canis familiaris) and Human
Journal of Comparative Psychology, 2004
Pet dogs (Canis familiaris) learn to detour a V-shaped fence effectively from an unfamiliar human demonstrator. In this article, 4 main features of the demonstrator's behavior are highlighted: (a) the manipulation of the target, (b) the familiarity of the demonstrator, (c) the role of verbal attention-getting behavior, and (d) whether a strange trained dog could also be an effective demonstrator. The results show that the main factor of a successful human demonstration is the continuous verbal communication with the dog during detouring. It was also found that an unfamiliar dog demonstrator was as efficient as the unfamiliar experimenter. The experiments provide evidence that in adult dogs, communicative context with humans is needed for effective interspecific social learning to take place.
Animal Cognition, 2019
The ability of animals to communicate using gaze is a rich area of research. How domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) use and respond to the gaze of humans is an area of particular interest. This study examined how three groups of domestic dogs from different populations (free-ranging dogs, pet dogs, and shelter dogs) responded to a human during three attentional state conditions: when the human was making eye contact (attentive), when the human was turned away (inattentive), and when the human exited the testing area. We found that dogs from different populations differed in their gazing behaviour. Freeranging dogs responded to the human's change in attentional state by looking significantly less at the human in the inattentive condition compared to the attentive condition. Pet and shelter dogs did not differ in their gazing behaviour between these conditions. However, they gazed significantly more at the human in both the inattentive and attentive conditions compared to the free-ranging dogs and also spent more time in the proximity of the experimenter. This study suggests that life experience plays an important role in how dogs respond to the attentional state of a human.
Maglieri V., Prato-Previde E., Tommasi E., Palagi E., 2019
Human-directed gazing, a keystone in dog-human communication, has been suggested to derive from both domestication and breed selection. The influence of genetic similarity to wolves and selective pressures on human-directed gazing is still under debate. Here, we used the ‘unsolvable task’ to compare Czechoslovakian Wolfdogs (CWDs, a close-to-wolf breed), German Shepherd Dogs (GSDs) and Labrador Retrievers (LRs). In the ‘solvable task’ all dogs learned to obtain the reward; however, differently from GSDs and LRs, CWDs rarely gazed at humans. In the ‘unsolvable task’ CWDs gazed significantly less towards humans compared to LRs but not to GSDs. Although all dogs were similarly motivated to explore the apparatus, CWDs and GSDs spent a larger amount of time in manipulating it compared to LRs. A clear difference emerged in gazing at the experimenter vs owner. CWDs gazed preferentially towards the experimenter (the unfamiliar subject manipulating the food), GSDs towards their owners and LRs gazed at humans independently from their level of familiarity. In conclusion, it emerges that the artificial selection operated on CWDs produced a breed more similar to ancient breeds (more wolf-like due to a less intense artificial selection) and not very human-oriented. The next step is to clarify GSDs’ behaviour and better understand the genetic role of this breed in shaping CWDs’ hetero-specific behaviour.
Effects of selection for cooperation and attention in dogs
Behavioral and Brain Functions, 2009
Background: It has been suggested that the functional similarities in the socio-cognitive behaviour of dogs and humans emerged as a consequence of comparable environmental selection pressures. Here we use a novel approach to account for the facilitating effect of domestication in dogs and reveal that selection for two factors under genetic influence (visual cooperation and focused attention) may have led independently to increased comprehension of human communicational cues. Method: In Study 1, we observed the performance of three groups of dogs in utilizing the human pointing gesture in a two-way object choice test. We compared breeds selected to work while visually separated from human partners (N = 30, 21 breeds, clustered as independent worker group), with those selected to work in close cooperation and continuous visual contact with human partners (N = 30, 22 breeds, clustered as cooperative worker group), and with a group of mongrels (N = 30). Secondly, it has been reported that, in dogs, selective breeding to produce an abnormal shortening of the skull is associated with a more pronounced area centralis (location of greatest visual acuity). In Study 2, breeds with high cephalic index and more frontally placed eyes (brachycephalic breeds, N = 25, 14 breeds) were compared with breeds with low cephalic index and laterally placed eyes (dolichocephalic breeds, N = 25, 14 breeds). Results: In Study 1, cooperative workers were significantly more successful in utilizing the human pointing gesture than both the independent workers and the mongrels. In study 2, we found that brachycephalic dogs performed significantly better than dolichocephalic breeds. Discussion: After controlling for environmental factors, we have provided evidence that at least two independent phenotypic traits with certain genetic variability affect the ability of dogs to rely on human visual cues. This finding should caution researchers against making simple generalizations about the effects of domestication and on dog-wolf differences in the utilization of human visual signals.