Comparative social cognition: what can dogs teach us? (original) (raw)
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REVIEW Comparative social cognition: what can dogs teach us?
2000
Research in comparative social cognition addresses how challenges of social living have formed the cognitive structures that control behaviours involved in communication, social learning and social understanding. In contrast to the traditional psychological approach, recent investigations take both evolutionary and functional questions into account, but the main emphasis is still on the mechanisms of behaviour. Although in traditional research 'comparative'
Comparative Social Cognition: From wolf and dog to humans
Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews, 2006
Dogs' special domestication processes, their natural socialization to humans, and the possibility of tracing evolutionary changes by comparing dogs' behavior to that of wolves, make dogs altogether unique for studying the evolution of complex social behavior. Here the authors report some much needed comparisons between the behavior of dogs and wolves. The authors reveal some dog-specific behaviors, especially with regard to their interactions with humans, by comparing dogs and wolves hand-reared identically. This approach ensures that behavioral differences between dogs and wolves will be due to species-specific (genetic) differences, and not to differences in experience. The results indicate that social attraction, presumably synchronizing behavior, and communicative abilities of dogs changed markedly during the process of domestication. The authors suggest that this model of dog behavior has the potential to provide new insights into the evolution of human socio-cognitive behavior.
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. #
Big thoughts in small brains? Dogs as a model for understanding human social cognition
NeuroReport, 2007
In this review we argued that dogs can provide a good model for both the evolution of human social-cognitive abilities and studying the underlying neural and genetic structures of these behavioural features. The key di¡erence between the present and other approaches for modelling human social evolution lies in the assumption that there is a large overlap between the human and dog behaviour complex because during their evolution in close contact with human groups dogs evolved functionally similar social skills. Thus the parallel investigation of the human and dog behaviour complex widens our possibility for understanding human social cognition because it allows the modelling of the interaction between various components in contrast to other models which are often restricted to modelling a single aspect of human social cognitive skills. NeuroReport 18:467^471
Cooperative Communication with Humans Evolved to Emerge Early in Domestic Dogs
Current Biology, 2021
Highlights d Dog puppies are more attracted to humans than wolf puppies raised by humans d Dog puppies use human gestures and make eye contact more than wolf puppies d Both species perform similarly on memory and inhibitory control tasks d Dogs' early emerging social skills demonstrate domestication's effect on cognition
Cooperative Communication with Humans Evolved to Emerge Early in Dogs
2021
While we know that dogs evolved from wolves through a process of domestication, it remains unclear how this process may have affected dog cognitive development. Here we tested dog (N=44) and wolf (N=37) puppies, 5-18 weeks old, on a battery of temperament and cognition tasks. Dog puppies were more attracted to humans, read human gestures more skillfully and made more eye contact with humans than wolf puppies. The two species were similarly attracted to objects and performed similarly on nonsocial measures of memory and inhibitory control. These results demonstrate the role of domestication in enhancing the cooperative communication skills of dogs through selection on attraction to humans, which altered developmental pathways. One Sentence Summary Domestication altered dogs’ developmental pathways to enhance their cooperative communication with humans.
Animal Behaviour, 2006
Social cognition, in particular the derivation of social information from observation of interactions between members of a social group, has been widely investigated in primates, but it has received little attention in other social mammals, although it has been anecdotally reported in the domestic dog, Canis familiaris. We recorded the behaviour of dogs ('spectators') that had observed controlled interactions between a human and a dog (the 'demonstrator') competing for an object, and that were subsequently allowed to interact freely with both participants. When the competitions were playful, as indicated by signals performed by the human, the spectator was more likely to approach the winner first and/or more rapidly, suggesting that winners of games are perceived as desirable social partners. When the human did not perform play signals, changing the social context from play to contest over a resource, spectators were slower to approach either of the participants, suggesting that participants in contests were less desirable as social partners than participants in games. If the dog was prevented from seeing the game, it still reacted differently to the winner and the loser, but its behaviour was not the same as after games that it had seen. We conclude that spectator dogs gain information from the players' subsequent behaviour as well as from direct observation of the game.