A Simple Reason for a Big Difference

Abstract

The present investigations were undertaken to compare interspecific communicative abilities of dogs and wolves, which were socialized to humans at comparable levels. The first study demonstrated that socialized wolves were able to locate the place of hidden food indicated by the touching and, to some extent, pointing cues provided by the familiar human experimenter, but their performance remained inferior to that of dogs. In the second study, we have found that, after undergoing training to solve a simple manipulation task, dogs that are faced with an insoluble version of the same problem look/gaze at the human, while socialized wolves do not. Based on these observations, we suggest that the key difference between dog and wolf behavior is the dogs' ability to look at the human's face. Since looking behavior has an important function in initializing and maintaining communicative interaction in human communication systems, we suppose that by positive feedback processes (both evolutionary and ontogenetically) the readiness of dogs to look at the human face has lead to complex forms of dog-human communication that cannot be achieved in wolves even after extended socialization.

Can your dog read your mind? Understanding the causes of canine perspective taking

“…Since the direction of this trend was the same for wolves and for domestic dogs, both might be said to share this predisposition. This is contrary to previous suggestions that dogs, but not wolves, have been prepared to look at human faces through the process of domestication (Miklósi et al, 2003). However, such a predisposition toward attentive individuals would not explain why different groups of canids differed in success based on the types of occluder utilized in Experiment 1 or in previous experiments of this type (Cooper et al, 2003;Gácsi et al, 2004).…”

“…If it is true that "the unusual skills of domestic dogs in using human communicative cues most likely evolved during and as a result of human domestication" (Hare et al, 2010, p. E6), then all healthy populations of domestic dogs should be expected to outperform nondomesticated canids on human attentionalstate tasks. Furthermore, this should hold true independent of the age, condition, home environment, or experience level of the dog under test (Hare et al, 2002;Miklósi et al, 2003;Riedel et al, 2008).…”

“…If the above predictions are correct, however, it would suggest that (1) experience and environment are important in the development of perspective-taking behavior and (2) the mechanisms responsible for perspective taking are not exclusive to domesticated canids, nor would domestication be sufficient to predict canid behavior on perspective-taking tasks. On the other hand, if perspective-taking behavior were to be identified in different populations of dogs, independent of environment, experience, and occluder type, but not shared by human-socialized wolves under matched conditions, one might argue that domestication resulted in a special adaptation, such as a predisposition to look at human faces (Miklósi et al, 2003) or more human-like social skills (Hare & Tomasello, 2005), not present in their undomesticated counterparts. In the present study, we compare the performance of pet domestic dogs, shelter dogs, and wolves on a begging task in order to test these predictions.…”

Horses (Equus caballus) use human local enhancement cues and adjust to human attention

“…In the case of dogs the head direction of humans seemed to be more important than the gaze, when comparing the performance of guide dogs of blind owners to pet dogs of sighted owners (Gaunet 2008;Ittyerah and Gaunet 2009). Furthermore, some studies showed wolves to be inferior (Hare et al 2002;Miklósi et al 2003;Virányi et al 2008) and others superior (Udell et al 2008) to dogs in their ability to read human cues and recognise their state of attention. Dogs may have inherited the ability to read human given cues from wolves through a process of selection and convergent evolution or, as in chimpanzees, may have gained it through socialization to humans and training (Hare et al 2002).…”

“…Some dogs brought the object to the front of the person even when they were facing away, and they begged from the person facing them in preference to the person facing away Virányi et al 2004). Such tasks have been determined to be cooperative in nature (Hare 2001), and especially domestic species have been bred for cooperativeness with humans (Gácsi et al 2005;Miklósi et al 2003). The domestication theory has been supported by the fact that cooperatively working dog breeds outperformed independently working breeds in such tasks (Gácsi et al 2009a).…”