- Recent findings reveal that dogs are born ready to communicate with and understand people.
- Studies show puppies can reciprocate human eye contact and follow gestures to locate food.
- Research also suggests puppies raised with little human contact can understand gestures without training.
Dogs often seem uncannily shrewd about what we’re trying to tell them.
A handful of recent studies offer surprising insights into the ways our caninecompanions are hardwired to communicate with people.
The most recent of those studies, published last week in the journalScientific Reports, found that dogs can understand the difference betweentheir owners’ accidental and deliberate actions. Earlier this summer, anothershowed that even when puppies primarily grow up around other dogs – not humans– they are still are better at understanding our gestures than wolf pupsraised by people. Still other research describes how puppies are born ready tointeract with humans, no training required.
“Dogs’ communicative skills uniquely position them to fill the niche that theydo alongside humans,” Emily Bray, a canine-cognition researcher at theUniversity of Arizona, Tucson, told Insider in an email. “Many of the tasksthat they perform for us, now and in the past (i.e. herding, hunting,detecting, acting as service dogs), are facilitated by their ability tounderstand our cues.”
Dogs recognize their owners’ intentions
Sometimes, when giving a four-legged friend a treat, we drop it by accident.Other times, owners withhold treats to teach their dogs a lesson.
According to last week’s study, dogs can tell the difference between a clumsyhuman who intends to give them a treat and a person who is deliberatelywithholding that reward.
The researchers set up an experiment: A person and a dog were separated by aplastic barrier, with a small gap in the middle large enough for a hand tosqueeze through. The barrier did not span the length of the room, however, sothe dogs could go around it if they wanted. The human participants passed thedog a treat through the gap in three ways. First, they offered the morsel butsuddenly dropped it on their side of barrier and said, “Oops.” Next, theyattempted to pass the treat over, but the gap was blocked. Lastly, theyoffered the treat but subsequently pulled back their arm and laughed.
The experimenters tried this set-up on 51 dogs and timed how long it took eachto walk around the barrier and retrieve the treat. The results showed that thedogs waited much longer to retrieve the treat when the experimenter hadpurposefully withheld it than when the experimenter dropped it or couldn’t getit through the barrier.
This suggests dogs can distinguish humans’ intentional actions from theirunintentional behavior and respond accordingly.
Even puppies raised with limited human contact know how to read us
Earlier this summer, Bray published a study analyzing the behavior of 8-week-old puppies – 375 of them, to be precise. The pups were being trained atCanine Companions, a service-dog organization in California. And they hadgrown up mostly with their litter mates, so had little one-on-one exposure topeople.
Bray’s team put the puppies through a series of tasks that measured theanimals’ ability to interact with humans. They measured how long it took thepuppies to follow an experimenter’s finger to find a hidden treat and how longthey held eye contact.
The team found that once an experimenter spoke to the dogs, saying, “Puppy,look!” and made eye contact, the puppies successfully reciprocated that eyecontact and could follow the gesture to locate the treats.
“If you take away the preceding eye contact and vocal cue and give a signalthat looks the same, dogs are not as likely to follow it,” Bray said.
The researchers found that the puppies’ performance on the tasks did notimprove over the course of the experiment, suggesting this wasn’t part of alearning process. Instead, they think, dogs are born with the social skillsthey need to read people and understand our intentions.
“We can assume that puppies started the task with the communicative abilitynecessary to be successful,” Bray said. She added, though, that dogs’abilities overall can improve these as they age, just as humans’ do.
Her team had access to each puppy’s pedigree, so could assess how related the375 dogs were to one another. According to Bray, 40% of the variation in thepuppies’ performance could likely be explained by their genes, suggesting“genetics plays a large role in shaping an individual dog’s cognition.”
- Recent findings reveal that dogs are born ready to communicate with and understand people.
- Studies show puppies can reciprocate human eye contact and follow gestures to locate food.
- Research also suggests puppies raised with little human contact can understand gestures without training.
Dogs often seem uncannily shrewd about what we’re trying to tell them.
A handful of recent studies offer surprising insights into the ways our caninecompanions are hardwired to communicate with people.
The most recent of those studies, published last week in the journalScientific Reports, found that dogs can understand the difference betweentheir owners’ accidental and deliberate actions. Earlier this summer, anothershowed that even when puppies primarily grow up around other dogs – not humans– they are still are better at understanding our gestures than wolf pupsraised by people. Still other research describes how puppies are born ready tointeract with humans, no training required.
“Dogs’ communicative skills uniquely position them to fill the niche that theydo alongside humans,” Emily Bray, a canine-cognition researcher at theUniversity of Arizona, Tucson, told Insider in an email. “Many of the tasksthat they perform for us, now and in the past (i.e. herding, hunting,detecting, acting as service dogs), are facilitated by their ability tounderstand our cues.”
Dogs recognize their owners’ intentions
Sometimes, when giving a four-legged friend a treat, we drop it by accident.Other times, owners withhold treats to teach their dogs a lesson.
According to last week’s study, dogs can tell the difference between a clumsyhuman who intends to give them a treat and a person who is deliberatelywithholding that reward.
The researchers set up an experiment: A person and a dog were separated by aplastic barrier, with a small gap in the middle large enough for a hand tosqueeze through. The barrier did not span the length of the room, however, sothe dogs could go around it if they wanted. The human participants passed thedog a treat through the gap in three ways. First, they offered the morsel butsuddenly dropped it on their side of barrier and said, “Oops.” Next, theyattempted to pass the treat over, but the gap was blocked. Lastly, theyoffered the treat but subsequently pulled back their arm and laughed.
The experimenters tried this set-up on 51 dogs and timed how long it took eachto walk around the barrier and retrieve the treat. The results showed that thedogs waited much longer to retrieve the treat when the experimenter hadpurposefully withheld it than when the experimenter dropped it or couldn’t getit through the barrier.
This suggests dogs can distinguish humans’ intentional actions from theirunintentional behavior and respond accordingly.
Even puppies raised with limited human contact know how to read us
Earlier this summer, Bray published a study analyzing the behavior of 8-week-old puppies – 375 of them, to be precise. The pups were being trained atCanine Companions, a service-dog organization in California. And they hadgrown up mostly with their litter mates, so had little one-on-one exposure topeople.
Labrador puppies from the non-profit Canine Companion for Independence,photographed at the Duke University Puppy Kindergarten. Canine.org/JaredLazarus
Bray’s team put the puppies through a series of tasks that measured theanimals’ ability to interact with humans. They measured how long it took thepuppies to follow an experimenter’s finger to find a hidden treat and how longthey held eye contact.
The team found that once an experimenter spoke to the dogs, saying, “Puppy,look!” and made eye contact, the puppies successfully reciprocated that eyecontact and could follow the gesture to locate the treats.
“If you take away the preceding eye contact and vocal cue and give a signalthat looks the same, dogs are not as likely to follow it,” Bray said.
The researchers found that the puppies’ performance on the tasks did notimprove over the course of the experiment, suggesting this wasn’t part of alearning process. Instead, they think, dogs are born with the social skillsthey need to read people and understand our intentions.
“We can assume that puppies started the task with the communicative abilitynecessary to be successful,” Bray said. She added, though, that dogs’abilities overall can improve these as they age, just as humans’ do.
Her team had access to each puppy’s pedigree, so could assess how related the375 dogs were to one another. According to Bray, 40% of the variation in thepuppies’ performance could likely be explained by their genes, suggesting“genetics plays a large role in shaping an individual dog’s cognition.”
Dogs are more likely to ask humans for help than wolves raised by people
Research published in July further underscored the idea that dogs arehardwired to be “man’s best friend.”
The study compared 44 puppies raised with their litter mates at CanineCompanions to 37 wolf puppies that recieved almost constant human care at awildlife center in Minnesota. The researchers tested how well the dogs andwolves could find a treat hidden in one of two covered bowls by following aperson’s gaze and pointed finger.
The dog pups were twice as likely as their wolf counterparts to pick the rightbowl, even though they’d spent far less time around people. Many of thepuppies got it right on the first try, suggesting they didn’t need training tofollow those human gestures.
“Dogs have naturally better skills at understanding humans’ cooperativecommunication than wolves do, even from puppyhood,” Hannah Salomons, an animalcognition researcher at Duke University who co-authored the study, toldInsider. “I would say, based on our results, that nature is definitely playinga greater role than nurture in this regard.”
The dogs were also 30 times more likely to approach a stranger than thewolves, Salomons’ group found. And in another task, in which the animals weretrying to get a treat stuck inside a closed container, the dogs also spentmore time looking to humans for help.
The wolves, by contrast, were more likely to try to tackle the problem ontheir own.
Source: Yahoo News
Lead Image: Bigstock
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