|
|
Range, F., Viranyi, Z., & Huber, L. (2007). Selective Imitation in Domestic Dogs. Curr Biol, 17(10), 868–872.
Abstract: Summary The transmission of cultural knowledge requires learners to identify what relevant information to retain and selectively imitate when observing others' skills. Young human infants--without relying on language or theory of mind--already show evidence of this ability. If, for example, in a communicative context, a model demonstrates a head action instead of a more efficient hand action, infants imitate the head action only if the demonstrator had no good reason to do so, suggesting that their imitation is a selective, interpretative process [1]. Early sensitivity to ostensive-communicative cues and to the efficiency of goal-directed actions is thought to be a crucial prerequisite for such relevance-guided selective imitation [2]. Although this competence is thought to be human specific [2], here we show an analog capacity in the dog. In our experiment, subjects watched a demonstrator dog pulling a rod with the paw instead of the preferred mouth action. In the first group, using the “inefficient” action was justified by the model's carrying of a ball in her mouth, whereas in the second group, no constraints could explain the demonstrator's choice. In the first trial after observation, dogs imitated the nonpreferred action only in the second group. Consequently, dogs, like children, demonstrated inferential selective imitation.
|
|
|
|
Schwab, C., & Huber, L. (2006). Obey or not obey? Dogs (Canis familiaris) behave differently in response to attentional states of their owners. J Comp Psychol, 120(3), 169–175.
Abstract: Sixteen domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) were tested in a familiar context in a series of 1-min trials on how well they obeyed after being told by their owner to lie down. Food was used in 1/3 of all trials, and during the trial the owner engaged in 1 of 5 activities. The dogs behaved differently depending on the owner's attention to them. When being watched by the owner, the dogs stayed lying down most often and/or for the longest time compared with when the owner read a book, watched TV, turned his or her back on them, or left the room. These results indicate that the dogs sensed the attentional state of their owners by judging observable behavioral cues such as eye contact and eye, head, and body orientation.
|
|
|
|
Virányi, Z., Range, F., & Huber, L. (2008). Attentiveness toward others and social learning in domestic dogs. In L. S. Röska-hardy, & E. Neumann-held (Eds.), Learning from Animals?: Examining the Nature of Human Uniqueness (pp. 141–154). New York, NY: Psychology Press.
|
|
|
|
Voelkl, B., & Huber, L. (2007). Common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) do not utilize social information in three simultaneous social foraging tasks. Anim. Cogn., 10(2), 149–158.
Abstract: Abstract Social foraging is suggested to increase foraging efficiency, as individuals might benefit from public information acquired by monitoring the foraging activities of other group members. We conducted a series experiments with captive common marmosets (Callithrix jacchus) to investigate to what extent marmosets utilize social information about food location when foraging simultaneously with conspecifics. Subjects were confronted with dominant and subordinate demonstrators in three experiments which differed in the amount of information about food location available to the demonstrators. In all three experiments, the focal subjects` performance in the social condition was not enhanced in comparison to a non-social control condition. Because we could rule out kleptoparasitism and aggressive displacements as explanations, we argue that the subjects tendency for scramble competition by avoiding others and dispersing over the foraging area seems to inhibit or mask the acquisition of social information about the location of rewarded patches.
|
|
|
|
Watanabe, S., & Huber, L. (2006). Animal logics: decisions in the absence of human language. Anim. Cogn., 9(4), 235–245.
Abstract: Without Abstract
|
|
