In what sense are dogs special? Canine cognition in comparative context

Lea, Stephen E. G.; Osthaus, Britta

doi:10.3758/s13420-018-0349-7

Cited by 52 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 343 publications

(347 reference statements)

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“…Research from the last decades has sought to understand how dogs perceive elements of their environment, learn about it, and use this knowledge to make informed decisions about proper behavior (Huber, 2016). Their skills in face processing, behavior reading, observational learning, and perspective taking play a crucial role here (for reviews, see Bensky et al, 2013;Kaminski and Marshall-Pescini, 2014;Lea and Osthaus, 2018). In what follows, we will summarize recent findings on dogs' understanding of human emotions, gestures, and actions.…”

Section: Individual Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Dogs Perceive Humans and How Humans Should Treat Their Pet Dogs: Linking Cognition With Ethics

2020

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Humans interact with animals in numerous ways and on numerous levels. We are indeed living in an “animal”s world,’ in the sense that our lives are very much intertwined with the lives of animals. This also means that animals, like those dogs we commonly refer to as our pets, are living in a “human’s world” in the sense that it is us, not them, who, to a large degree, define and manage the interactions we have with them. In this sense, the human-animal relationship is nothing we should romanticize: it comes with clear power relations and thus with a set of responsibilities on the side of those who exercise this power. This holds, despite the fact that we like to think about our dogs as human’s best friend. Dogs have been part of human societies for longer than any other domestic species. Like no other species they exemplify the role of companion animals. Relationships with pet dogs are both very widespread and very intense, often leading to strong attachments between owners or caregivers and animals and to a treatment of these dogs as family members or even children. But how does this relationship look from the dogs’ perspective? How do they perceive the humans they engage with? What responsibilities and duties arise from the kind of mutual understanding, attachment, and the supposedly “special” bonds we form with them? Are there ethical implications, maybe even ethical implications beyond animal welfare? The past decades have seen an upsurge of research from comparative cognition on pet dogs’ cognitive and social skills, especially in comparison with and reference to humans. We will therefore set our discussion about the nature and ethical dimensions of the human–dog relationship against the background of the current empirical knowledge on dog (social) cognition. This allows us to analyze the human–dog relationship by applying an interdisciplinary approach that starts from the perspective of the dog to ultimately inform the perspective of humans. It is our aim to thereby identify ethical dimensions of the human–dog relationship that have been overlooked so far.

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Section: Individual Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Dogs Perceive Humans and How Humans Should Treat Their Pet Dogs: Linking Cognition With Ethics

2020

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“…Domestic dogs provide an excellent model for studying the cognitive mechanisms and evolutionary origins of social cognition in general and selective trust in particular, for several reasons. Like wolves and chimpanzees, the ancestors of domestic dogs were cursorial social hunters, meaning that they historically needed to work in close coordination with others in a relatively organized way (Lea and Osthaus 2018 ). In addition, dogs have an arguably unique evolutionary history that is closely entwined with ours.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What’s the point? Domestic dogs’ sensitivity to the accuracy of human informants

et al. 2021

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Dogs excel at understanding human social-communicative gestures like points and can distinguish between human informants who vary in characteristics such as knowledge or familiarity. This study explores if dogs, like human children, can use human social informants’ past accuracy when deciding whom to trust. Experiment 1 tested whether dogs would behave differently in the presence of an accurate (vs. inaccurate) informant. Dogs followed an accurate informant’s point significantly above chance. Further, when presented with an inaccurate point, dogs were more likely to ignore it and choose the correct location. Experiment 2 tested whether dogs could use informant past accuracy to selectively follow the point of the previously accurate informant. In test trials when informants simultaneously pointed at different locations (only one of which contained a treat), dogs chose the accurate informant at chance levels. Experiment 3 controlled for non-social task demands (e.g. understanding of hidden baiting and occlusion events) that may have influenced Experiment 2 performance. In test trials, dogs chose to follow the accurate (vs. inaccurate) informant. This suggests that like children, dogs may be able to use informants’ past accuracy when choosing between information sources. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10071-021-01493-5.

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“…In a recent, highly debated review, Lea and Osthaus (2018) investigated whether the cognitive capacities of dogs are special. This formidable task was based on the question of whether dogs deviate from what one could expect them to show as a member of carnivorans, social hunters, or domestic animals.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As Lea and Osthaus (2018) themselves admitted, their conclusion was based on what is currently known, not only about the cognitive abilities of dogs, but especially about the respective abilities of other carnivorans, social hunters, and domestic animals. In many cases we have a reasonably good understanding of dog cognition, due to an enormous number of experimental, well-controlled studies that have been conducted over the last two decades, but the same quantity of empirical evidence is lacking in most comparison groups, with the exception of primates.…”

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confidence: 99%

Selective overimitation in dogs

et al. 2020

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Dogs have not only shown different kinds of social learning, from either conspecifics or humans, including do-as-I-do imitation, deferred imitation, and selective imitation, but in two previous studies they have also shown an eagerness to copy causally irrelevant actions. This so-called overimitation is prevalent in humans but is totally absent in great apes. Whereas in one of two previous studies dogs copied actions from an experimenter (Johnston, Holden, & Santos in Developmental Science, 20, e12460, 2017), in the other a reasonable number of the dogs copied the irrelevant actions from their human caregiver (Huber, Popovová, Riener, Salobir, & Cimarelli in Learning & Behavior, 46, 387-397, 2018). Dogs have not only been domesticated to live and work with us, but many companion dogs develop strong affiliative relationships with their caregiver, which are akin to the attachment bonds between human children and their mother. We therefore assumed that overimitation in dogs might be strongly motivated by social factors, such as affiliation or conformity. To test this hypothesis, we confronted dogs with the same demonstration of causally relevant and irrelevant actions as in the previous study (Huber et al. in Learning & Behavior, 46, 387-397, 2018), but this time with an unfamiliar experimenter instead of the caregiver as the demonstrator. The results strongly supported our hypothesis: Whereas half of the subjects in the previous study replicated the causally irrelevant action demonstrated by their caregiver, only very few did so when the actions were demonstrated by the experimenter. We conclude that the eagerness of dogs to learn from humans and to copy even unnecessary actions is strongly facilitated by their relationship with the particular human.

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In what sense are dogs special? Canine cognition in comparative context

Cited by 52 publications

References 343 publications

How Dogs Perceive Humans and How Humans Should Treat Their Pet Dogs: Linking Cognition With Ethics

How Dogs Perceive Humans and How Humans Should Treat Their Pet Dogs: Linking Cognition With Ethics

What’s the point? Domestic dogs’ sensitivity to the accuracy of human informants

Selective overimitation in dogs

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