Sheepdogs better than hounds at responding to human visual cues, study finds
EU-funded researchers in Australia and Hungary studied the response of different dog breeds to a human pointing gesture and found that some dog breeds are clearly better at it than others. The results caution against making assumptions about differences between domesticated dogs and wolves, and show the importance of paying attention to different breeds when carrying out behavioural experiments. The study is published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Functions. The study is an outcome of the REFCOM ('Origins of Referential Communication') project, which was funded with EUR 1.5 million under the 'New and Emerging Science and Technologies' budget line of the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6). REFCOM partners studied the defining features of human cognition from a variety of scientific and technical perspectives, with the aim of proposing a model of how and why humans' unique use of communication evolved. 'It has been suggested that the study of the domestic dog might help to explain the evolution of human communicative skills, because the dog has been selected for living in a human environment and engaging in communicative interactions with humans for more than 10,000 years,' explained Márta Gácsi of Eötvös University in Hungary. As a species, dogs outperform chimpanzees and wolves on a test that gauges whether they can capitalise on a human gesture to choose between one of two containers. Paying attention, or watching the human more closely, helps subjects perform better; the tendency for domesticated dogs to look at humans has previously been shown to play a role in differing success rates between dogs and wolves. But while it is tempting to generalise and say that dogs are better than wolves at understanding human gestures (chimps are well out of the running), it isn't quite correct. Some dogs don't perform this task well, either. In the current study, the researchers looked at whether dogs that had been selectively bred to cooperate with humans in visually guided tasks, such as herding dogs, would be more responsive to a pointing gesture than dogs bred to carry out tasks without visual contact, like sled dogs. The team studied 180 dogs separated into three groups: cooperative workers (sheepdogs and gun dogs), independent workers (hounds, sled dogs, livestock guard dogs and underground-hunting dogs) and mongrels that did not closely resemble any specific breed. They were all between two and three years old, had been socialised at the same level in human families, walked regularly, gone through basic obedience training and enjoyed a life away from the chain and kennel. Each dog went through 20 trials: held back by their owners, they watched as a researcher placed two bowls on the ground, one of which the dog knew contained a tasty treat. The researcher made eye contact with the dog, pointed to the bowl and then lowered his or her arm. The owners then released their dogs, and everyone watched to see which bowl the dog would choose. Would they rely on the gesture, or on their memory of where they found their last snack? While all of the dogs were clearly able to respond to the human gesture, the cooperative workers outperformed both the independent workers and the mongrels. The researchers suggest that this 'might not be attributable to differences in the [dogs'] cognitive abilities per se, but rather reflects a genetic tendency to be responsive to social stimuli in a cooperative context'. The difference between breeds, they argue, goes against the notion that this particular social sensitivity was gained by dogs generally during the process of domestication. The researchers also looked at differences in performance between dogs with short snouts and more frontally placed eyes with those who had longer snouts and more laterally placed eyes. The dogs with more frontally placed eyes performed better. This was explained by their ability to focus on what is in front of them, rather than being distracted by peripheral visual information. According to Dr Gácsi, the study is the first to reveal striking differences in the response of different dog breeds to this human-cued, 'two-way object choice' test. 'Although these results may appear to be unsurprising,' she said, 'there is a common tendency to make assumptions about genetic explanations for differences in comprehension between 'dogs' and wolves. Our results show that researchers must be careful to control for animal breed when carrying out behavioural experiments.'
Countries
Australia, Hungary