BY MARY BATES
Dogs are highly skilled at reading human social cues, more so than any other animal. But even as researchers learn more about the social-cognitive abilities of dogs, a question remains: Did these skills arise from domestication and millennia of co-evolution with humans, or were their roots present before dogs became man’s best friend?
To answer this question, Friederike Range and Zsófia Virányi of the Messerli Research Institute at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna tested both dogs and wolves on a social learning task. Previous research indicates dogs can benefit when a human or another dog acts as a demonstrator, for instance indicating the location of hidden food.
Range and Virányi tested 11 North American grey wolves and 14 mixed-breed dogs from shelters. All of the dogs and wolves were born in captivity, bottle-fed, and raised together with extensive contact with humans at the Wolf Science Center of Game Park Ernstbrunn, Austria.
When the animals were between five and seven months old, Range and Virányi presented them with a social learning task. The subjects watched as either a human or a familiar, specially trained dog hid a treat — a dead chick — in a meadow. To test how closely the dogs and wolves were paying attention, there were also trials in which the demonstrator only pretended to hide the chick. To control for the animals’ simply using their sense of smell to find the hidden food, the experimenters conducted trials in which they hid the chick out of sight before bringing the dog or wolf to the meadow.
Watching and Learning
Overall, both wolves and dogs were more likely to find the treat after watching a human or dog demonstrator hide it, showing that they were relying on the visual information provided by the demonstrator rather than their sense of smell. That’s not to say they didn’t use their powerful noses at all; each animal sometimes found the chick in the control trials with no demonstration. Range and Virányi also note that both wolves and dogs seemed to rely less on their sense of smell and more on the visual information provided by the demonstrators as they grew older. Older pups watched the demonstrations longer and were less successful in finding the chick in the trials with no demonstration.
Wolves and dogs were rarely tricked when a human demonstrator only pretended to hide food, showing that the animals were watching the details of the demonstration. However, while dogs showed the same behavior after a dog demonstrator pretended to hide food, wolves paid less attention to the dog demonstrator than the human one and didn’t differentiate between when the dog hid the treat and only pretended to do so. Interestingly, the wolves were less interested in the dog demonstration than the dogs even on trials in which the demonstrator hid the treat.
Range and Virányi have some ideas why wolves were less interested in dog demonstrators than humans ones. First, wolves were accustomed to humans rewarding them with food during training sessions. Since wolves expect humans, but not other dogs, to provide them with food, the dog demonstrator may not have piqued their interest in the same way. Additionally, wolves may have focused on different details of the demonstration. Range and Virányi note the demonstrator dogs did not like taking the dead chick in their mouths to hide them and would turn their heads or try to spit it out. It’s possible the wolves noticed this and interpreted their behavior as indicating the snack was not particularly tasty, so they didn’t bother to look for it. Range and Virányi suggest that being more attentive to the details of other individual’s actions is probably more important for wolves than dogs. Wolf society requires cooperative actions with other pack members in order to execute highly coordinated actions like group hunting.
The researchers conclude that dogs are not unique in their ability to learn from humans, and this skill may have already been present in their wolf ancestors. When humans began domesticating dogs, they could have built on this preexisting capacity of wolves to learn from others. This ability to learn from others, even those outside of one’s species, may have benefited the domestication process and cemented dogs’ reputation as man’s best friend.