Dog Imitation and Its Possible Origins

Huber, Ludwig; Range, Friederike; Virányi, Zsófia

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-53994-7_4

Cited by 15 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 89 publications

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“…In any event, the stray dogs in Plaza Perú exhibited greater proximity to and sociality with humans than those belonging to the same category reported in the literature. Dogs could stay within 2 m or even a few centimeters of humans when resting or begging, especially when Cachupín, the free-roaming pet dog, was present; social facilitation may have been at play here [81].…”

Section: Plaza Perú and Adjacent Areasmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Additionally, although some dogs randomly crossed streets, they were often seen using crosswalks, either alone or with conspecifics (see Figure 4). This safe behavior was probably learned either by observing [81,83,84] or by following pedestrians. Recent results have revealed that the more affiliated dogs are with humans, the more they imitate their behavior [85][86][87].…”

Section: Plaza Perú and Adjacent Areasmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The familiar stray dogs, therefore, exhibited a peculiar degree of adaptation in this urban context, as well as all their usual sociality skills. Their territoriality patterns were built on adjustments and learning practices that enabled them to, for example, empty certain types of rubbish bins by tilting them (for dogs' ability to manipulate objects to obtain food, see [21,108]), approach humans to obtain some kind of food either directly or indirectly, in the form of leftovers (learning, see [40]), or cross one-way and even two-way roads by looking both ways to see if cars were coming (social learning [83,84]) or follow a group of pedestrians using a crosswalk (for a recent review of experiments on dogs' imitation of social agents, see [81]). We calculated that the familiar stray dogs in a pack crossed at least 8-10 streets per day.…”

Section: Dogs Adapt Their Territory To the Citymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The boundaries and landmarks of the dogs living in houses or apartments were, of course, dependent on those of their owners [20]. The boundaries and landmarks of the free canines' territory were perfectly superimposed onto the textures of the concrete urban fabric, reflecting a process of plasticity (e.g., [51,81,114,115]). There was, however, no evidence of local knowledge transmission or cultural transmission within each pack.…”

Section: Passages Boundaries and Landmarks Of The Urban Canine Terrimentioning

confidence: 99%

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Coexistence of Diversified Dog Socialities and Territorialities in the City of Concepción, Chile

Miternique

Gaunet

2020

Animals

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There has been scant research on the presence of stray dogs in cities. Studying their very considerable presence in Concepción (Chile) provided a unique opportunity to learn more about the different patterns of sociality and territoriality exhibited by the dog species. Via a set of case studies, we examined the behavior of urban dogs, adopting an ethnographic methodology. This yielded findings of the dogs’ cognitive, social and spatial adjustment abilities, i.e., their territorialities. Our hypothesis was validated: We found numerous types of sociability, we confirmed the presence of two previously established categories: family dogs (pets, guard dogs and beggars’ dogs) and stray dogs (dogs almost entirely unused to humans, aggressive dogs at the far end of the campus and feral dogs in the woods). We also identified three new ones: familiar stray dogs in packs (dogs both spatially and socially close to humans), pet-stray dogs (i.e., village dogs interacting closely with people) and free-roaming pet dogs. We conclude that an ongoing two-way bond between humans and animals allowed these dogs to became part of a city’s urban identity and explains the stray dogs’ plasticity in terms of adapting to the diversified urban habitat. We postulate that it was the human culture and range of urban areas in Concepción that gave rise to this unique diversity of sociospatial positioning and level of adjustment (e.g., dogs crossing crosswalks).

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Section: Plaza Perú and Adjacent Areasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Plaza Perú and Adjacent Areasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Dogs Adapt Their Territory To the Citymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Passages Boundaries and Landmarks Of The Urban Canine Terrimentioning

confidence: 99%

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Coexistence of Diversified Dog Socialities and Territorialities in the City of Concepción, Chile

Miternique

Gaunet

2020

Animals

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“…The link between attention and action coordination has so far mainly been studied in regard to social learning where several studies found that the amount of attention paid to potential models seems to be more or less directly linked to the success in acquiring specific behaviors (Lonsdorf, 2005 ; Ottoni et al, 2005 ; Renevey et al, 2013 ). Dogs have proven successful in several tasks that are thought to require high attention toward conspecifics and humans, such as experiments on social learning (Kubinyi et al, 2003 ; Topál et al, 2006 ; Range et al, 2007 , 2011 ; Huber et al, 2009 , 2014 ; Miller et al, 2009 ; Mersmann et al, 2011 ), social referencing (Merola et al, 2012a , b ), communication (Virányi et al, 2004 , 2006 ; Schwab and Huber, 2006 ; Udell and Wynne, 2008 ; Dorey et al, 2009 ; Kaminski et al, 2012 ), responding to unequal rewards (Range et al, 2009b , 2012 ) and cooperation (Naderi et al, 2001 ; Bräuer et al, 2013 ; Ostojić and Clayton, 2014 ). Furthermore, young dogs follow human pointing better and look at humans more readily than human-raised wolves (Miklósi et al, 2003 ; Gácsi et al, 2009 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tracking the evolutionary origins of dog-human cooperation: the â€œCanine Cooperation Hypothesisâ€

2015

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At present, beyond the fact that dogs can be easier socialized with humans than wolves, we know little about the motivational and cognitive effects of domestication. Despite this, it has been suggested that during domestication dogs have become socially more tolerant and attentive than wolves. These two characteristics are crucial for cooperation, and it has been argued that these changes allowed dogs to successfully live and work with humans. However, these domestication hypotheses have been put forward mainly based on dog-wolf differences reported in regard to their interactions with humans. Thus, it is possible that these differences reflect only an improved capability of dogs to accept humans as social partners instead of an increase of their general tolerance, attentiveness and cooperativeness. At the Wolf Science Center, in order to detangle these two explanations, we raise and keep dogs and wolves similarly socializing them with conspecifics and humans and then test them in interactions not just with humans but also conspecifics. When investigating attentiveness toward human and conspecific partners using different paradigms, we found that the wolves were at least as attentive as the dogs to their social partners and their actions. Based on these findings and the social ecology of wolves, we propose the Canine Cooperation Hypothesis suggesting that wolves are characterized with high social attentiveness and tolerance and are highly cooperative. This is in contrast with the implications of most domestication hypotheses about wolves. We argue, however, that these characteristics of wolves likely provided a good basis for the evolution of dog-human cooperation.

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Orcas remember what to copy: a deferred and interference-resistant imitation study

et al. 2023

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Response facilitation has often been portrayed as a "low level" category of social learning, because the demonstrator's action, which is already in the observer's repertoire, automatically triggers that same action, rather than induces the learning of a new action. One way to rule out response facilitation consists of introducing a delay between the demonstrator's behaviour and the observer's response to let their possible effects wear off. However, this may not rule out "delayed response facilitation" in which the subject could be continuously "mentally rehearsing" the demonstrated actions during the waiting period. We used a do-as-the-other-did paradigm in two orcas to study whether they displayed cognitive control regarding their production of familiar actions by 1) introducing a delay ranging from 60 to 150 sec between observing and producing the actions and 2) interspersing distractor (nontarget) actions performed by the demonstrator and by the subjects during the delay period. These two manipulations were aimed at preventing the mental rehearsal of the observed actions during the delay period. Both orcas copied the model's target actions on command after various delay periods, and crucially, despite the presence of distractor actions. These findings suggest that orcas are capable of selectively retrieving a representation of an observed action to generate a delayed matching response.Moreover, these results lend further support to the proposal that the subjects' performance relied not only on a mental representation of the specific actions that were requested to copy, but also flexibly on the abstract and domain general rule requested by the specific "copy command". Our findings strengthen the view that orcas and other cetaceans are capable of flexible and controlled social learning.

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Dog Imitation and Its Possible Origins

Cited by 15 publications

References 89 publications

Coexistence of Diversified Dog Socialities and Territorialities in the City of Concepción, Chile

Coexistence of Diversified Dog Socialities and Territorialities in the City of Concepción, Chile

Tracking the evolutionary origins of dog-human cooperation: the â€œCanine Cooperation Hypothesisâ€

Orcas remember what to copy: a deferred and interference-resistant imitation study

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Dog Imitation and Its Possible Origins

Cited by 15 publications

References 89 publications

Coexistence of Diversified Dog Socialities and Territorialities in the City of Concepción, Chile

Coexistence of Diversified Dog Socialities and Territorialities in the City of Concepción, Chile

Tracking the evolutionary origins of dog-human cooperation: the â€œCanine Cooperation Hypothesisâ€

Orcas remember what to copy: a deferred and interference-resistant imitation study

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Tracking the evolutionary origins of dog-human cooperation: the â€œCanine Cooperation Hypothesisâ€