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Gácsi, M., Gyoöri, B., Virányi, Z., Kubinyi, E., Range, F., Belényi, B., et al. (2009). Explaining Dog Wolf Differences in Utilizing Human Pointing Gestures: Selection for Synergistic Shifts in the Development of Some Social Skills. PLoS ONE, 4(8), e6584.
Abstract: <sec> <title>Background</title> <p>The comparison of human related communication skills of socialized canids may help to understand the evolution and the epigenesis of gesture comprehension in humans. To reconcile previously contradicting views on the origin of dogs' outstanding performance in utilizing human gestures, we suggest that dog-wolf differences should be studied in a more complex way.</p> </sec><sec> <title>Methodology/Principal Findings</title> <p>We present data both on the performance and the behaviour of dogs and wolves of different ages in a two-way object choice test. Characteristic behavioural differences showed that for wolves it took longer to establish eye contact with the pointing experimenter, they struggled more with the handler, and pups also bit her more before focusing on the human's signal. The performance of similarly hand-reared 8-week-old dogs and wolves did not differ in utilizing the simpler proximal momentary pointing. However, when tested with the distal momentary pointing, 4-month-old pet dogs outperformed the same aged hand reared wolves. Thus early and intensive socialisation does not diminish differences between young dogs and wolves in behaviour and performance. Socialised adult wolves performed similarly well as dogs in this task without pretraining. The success of adult wolves was accompanied with increased willingness to cooperate.</p> </sec><sec> <title>Conclusion/Significance</title> <p>Thus, we provide evidence for the first time that socialised adult wolves are as successful in relying on distal momentary pointing as adult pet dogs. However, the delayed emergence of utilising human distal momentary pointing in wolves shows that these wild canines react to a lesser degree to intensive socialisation in contrast to dogs, which are able to control agonistic behaviours and inhibition of actions in a food related task early in development. We suggest a “synergistic” hypothesis, claiming that positive feedback processes (both evolutionary and epigenetic) have increased the readiness of dogs to attend to humans, providing the basis for dog-human communication.</p> </sec>
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Soproni, K., Miklósi, Á., Topál, J., & Csányi, V. (2002). Dogs' (Canis familiaris) responsiveness to human pointing gestures. J Comp Psychol, 116(1), 27–34.
Abstract: In a series of 3 experiments, dogs (Canis familiaris) were presented with variations of the human pointing gesture: gestures with reversed direction of movement, cross-pointing, and different arm extensions. Dogs performed at above chance level if they could see the hand (and index finger) protruding from the human body contour. If these minimum requirements were not accessible, dogs still could rely on the body position of the signaler. The direction of movement of the pointing arm did not influence the performance. In summary, these observations suggest that dogs are able to rely on relatively novel gestural forms of the human communicative pointing gesture and that they are able to comprehend to some extent the referential nature of human pointing.
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Kubinyi, E., Topál, J., Miklósi, Á., & Csányi, V. (2003). Dogs (Canis familiaris) learn their owners via observation in a manipulation task. J. Comp. Psychol., 117(2), 156–165.
Abstract: Eighty-seven pet dogs (Canis familiaris) were involved in an experiment in which they had to solve a task to obtain a ball. After witnessing a full demonstration by their owner (10 times pushing the handle of the box, which released a ball), most dogs preferred to touch the handle sooner and more frequently in comparison with other parts of the box, and they used the handle to get the ball. In contrast dogs in 3 control groups developed their own respective methods. The lack of emergence of the ball and playing after the demonstration did not affect the learning performance strongly. This suggests that in dogs the outcome of a demonstration plays only a restricted role in the manifestation of social learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
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Miklósi, Á., Kubinyi, E., Topál, J., Gácsi, M., Virányi, Z., & Csányi, V. (2003). A Simple Reason for a Big Difference: Wolves Do Not Look Back at Humans, but Dogs Do. Current Biology, 13(9), 763–766.
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.
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Virányi, Z., Topál, J., Gácsi, M., Miklósi, Á., & Csányi, V. (2004). Dogs respond appropriately to cues of humans' attentional focus. Behav. Process., 66(2), 161–172.
Abstract: Dogs' ability to recognise cues of human visual attention was studied in different experiments. Study 1 was designed to test the dogs' responsiveness to their owner's tape-recorded verbal commands (Down!) while the Instructor (who was the owner of the dog) was facing either the dog or a human partner or none of them, or was visually separated from the dog. Results show that dogs were more ready to follow the command if the Instructor attended them during instruction compared to situations when the Instructor faced the human partner or was out of sight of the dog. Importantly, however, dogs showed intermediate performance when the Instructor was orienting into 'empty space' during the re-played verbal commands. This suggests that dogs are able to differentiate the focus of human attention. In Study 2 the same dogs were offered the possibility to beg for food from two unfamiliar humans whose visual attention (i.e. facing the dog or turning away) was systematically varied. The dogs' preference for choosing the attentive person shows that dogs are capable of using visual cues of attention to evaluate the human actors' responsiveness to solicit food-sharing. The dogs' ability to understand the communicatory nature of the situations is discussed in terms of their social cognitive skills and unique evolutionary history.
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Gácsi, M., McGreevy, P., Kara, E., & Miklósi, Á. (2009). Effects of selection for cooperation and attention in dogs. Behav Brain Funct, 5, 31.
Abstract: ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: It has been suggested that the functional similarities in the socio-cognitive behaviour of dogs and humans emerged as a consequence of comparable environmental selection pressures. Here we use a novel approach to account for the facilitating effect of domestication in dogs and reveal that selection for two factors under genetic influence (visual cooperation and focused attention) may have led independently to increased comprehension of human communicational cues. METHOD: In Study 1, we observed the performance of three groups of dogs in utilizing the human pointing gesture in a two-way object choice test. We compared breeds selected to work while visually separated from human partners (N = 30, 21 breeds, clustered as independent worker group), with those selected to work in close cooperation and continuous visual contact with human partners (N = 30, 22 breeds, clustered as cooperative worker group), and with a group of mongrels (N = 30).Secondly, it has been reported that, in dogs, selective breeding to produce an abnormal shortening of the skull is associated with a more pronounced area centralis (location of greatest visual acuity). In Study 2, breeds with high cephalic index and more frontally placed eyes (brachycephalic breeds, N = 25, 14 breeds) were compared with breeds with low cephalic index and laterally placed eyes (dolichocephalic breeds, N = 25, 14 breeds). RESULTS: In Study 1, cooperative workers were significantly more successful in utilizing the human pointing gesture than both the independent workers and the mongrels.In study 2, we found that brachycephalic dogs performed significantly better than dolichocephalic breeds. DISCUSSION: After controlling for environmental factors, we have provided evidence that at least two independent phenotypic traits with certain genetic variability affect the ability of dogs to rely on human visual cues. This finding should caution researchers against making simple generalizations about the effects of domestication and on dog-wolf differences in the utilization of human visual signals.
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Maros, K., Dóka, A., & Miklósi, Á. (2008). Behavioural correlation of heart rate changes in family dogs. Appl. Anim. Behav. Sci., 109(2), 329–341.
Abstract: Fourteen dogs (7 males and 7 females) were tested for their heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV) responses in different activities and environmental challenges while their movement was controlled. First, we wanted to compare the dogs? cardiac responses in different body positions (lying, sitting and standing) and during slow walking to reveal their possible influence on HR and HRV. Second, we tested the HR response during an attentive state when the dog was gazing at its favourite toy while remaining in a steady body position. Finally we investigated the heart activity during separation from the owner. We also analysed the individual differences and the influence of gender on the heart responses. We found that the HR increased during periods of increased activity (walking) and was lowest during lying, while it did not differ between sitting and standing. At the same time no changes in HRV were found in the case of different body positions and walking. In contrast, HRV significantly increased when dogs oriented towards their favourite toy, and we found a distinct individual characteristic HR change in this situation compared to the similar body position without the toy being shown. Interestingly during separation from the owner the HR did not increase, but when a strange person was petting the dog, a significant increasing effect was seen in the HR. However the HRV increased only when the petting was discontinued. In general, large individual variation was found with regard to the HR and HRV, while gender did not influence the cardiac activity of the dogs.These results show that body position affected HR significantly in dogs. Further it seems that HRV could be a good indicator of the dog's attentive state. Thus in future studies both the physical and cognitive factors should be given more attention when HR or HRV is investigated as a dependent variable.
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Pongrácz, P., Miklósi, Á., Vida, V., & Csányi, V. (2005). The pet dogs ability for learning from a human demonstrator in a detour task is independent from the breed and age. Appl. Anim. Behav. Sci., 90(3), 309–323.
Abstract: There are many indications and much practical knowledge about the different tasks which various breeds of dogs are selected for. Correspondingly these different breeds are known to possess different physical and mental abilities. We hypothesized that commonly kept breeds will show differences in their problem solving ability in a detour task around a V-shaped fence, and also, that breed differences will affect their learning ability from a human demonstrator, who demonstrates a detour around the fence. Subjects were recruited in Hungarian pet dog schools. We compared the results of the 10 most common breeds in our sample when they were tested in the detour task without human demonstration. There was no significant difference between the latencies of detour, however, there was a trend that German Shepherd dogs were the quickest and Giant Schnauzers were the slowest in this test. For testing the social learning ability of dogs we formed three breed groups (“utility”, “shepherd” and “hunting”). There were no significant differences between these, all the breed groups learned equally well from the human demonstrator. However, we found that dogs belonging to the “shepherd” group looked back more frequently to their owner than the dogs in the “hunting” group. Further, we have found that the age of pet dogs did not affect their social learning ability in the detour task. Our results showed that the pet status of a dog has probably a stronger effect on its cognitive performance and human related behaviour than its age or breed. These results emphasize that socialization and common activities with the dog might overcome the possible breed differences, if we give the dogs common problem solving, or social learning tasks.
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Miklósi, Á., & Soproni, K. (2006). A comparative analysis of animals' understanding of the human pointing gesture. Anim. Cogn., 9(2), 81–93.
Abstract: We review studies demonstrating the ability of some animals to understand the human pointing gesture. We present a 3-step analysis of the topic. (1) We compare and evaluate current experimental methods (2) We compare available experimental results on performance of different species and investigate the interaction of species differences and other independent variables (3) We evaluate how our present understanding of pointing comprehension answers questions about function, evolution and mechanisms. Recently, a number of different hypotheses have been put forward to account for the presence of this ability in some species and for the lack of such comprehension in others. In our view, there is no convincing evidence for the assumption that the competitive lifestyles of apes would inhibit the utilization of this human gesture. Similarly, domestication as a special evolutionary factor in the case of some species falls short in explaining high levels of pointing comprehension in some non-domestic species. We also disagree with the simplistic view of describing the phenomenon as a simple form of conditioning. We suggest that a more systematic comparative research is needed to understand the emerging communicative representational abilities in animals that provide the background for comprehending the human pointing gesture.
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Pongrácz, P., Vida, V., Bánhegyi, P., & Miklósi, Á. (2008). How does dominance rank status affect individual and social learning performance in the dog (Canis familiaris)? Anim. Cogn., 11, 75–82.
Abstract: Dogs can learn effectively to detour around a V-shaped fence after observing a demonstration from either an unfamiliar human or dog demonstrator. We found earlier that there is substantial individual variation between the dogs' performance, even when using the same experimental conditions. Here, we investigate if the subjects' relative dominance rank with other dogs had an effect on their social learning performance. On the basis of the owners' answers to a questionnaire, subjects from multi-dog homes were sorted into groups of dominant and subordinate dogs. In Experiment 1, dominant and subordinate dogs were tested without demonstration and we did not find any difference between the groups-they had similarly low detour performances on their own. In Experiment 2 and 3, dogs from single dog and multi-dog households were tested in the detour task with demonstration by an unfamiliar dog, or human, respectively. The results showed that social learning performance of the single dogs fell between the dominant and subordinate multi-dogs with both dog and human demonstration. Subordinate dogs displayed significantly better performance after having observed a dog demonstrator in comparison to dominant dogs. In contrast, the performance of dominant and subordinate dogs was almost similar, when they observed a human demonstrator. These results suggest that perceived dominance rank in its own group has a strong effect on social learning in dogs, but this effect seems to depend also on the demonstrator species. This finding reveals an intricate organization of the social structure in multi-dog households, which can contribute to individual differences existing among dogs.
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