Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) and great apes from the genus Pan were tested on a series of object choice tasks. In each task, the location of hidden food was indicated for subjects by some kind of communicative, behavioral, or physical cue. On the basis of differences in the ecologies of these 2 genera, as well as on previous research, the authors hypothesized that dogs should be especially skillful in using human communicative cues such as the pointing gesture, whereas apes should be especially skillful in using physical, causal cues such as food in a cup making noise when it is shaken. The overall pattern of performance by the 2 genera strongly supported this social-dog, causal-ape hypothesis. This result is discussed in terms of apes' adaptations for complex, extractive foraging and dogs' adaptations, during the domestication process, for cooperative communication with humans.

Cognition is one of the most flexible tools enabling adaptation to environmental variation. Living close to humans is thought to influence social as well as physical cognition of animals throughout domestication and ontogeny. Here, we investigated to what extent physical cognition and two domains of social cognition of dogs have been affected by domestication and ontogeny. To address the effects of domestication, we compared captive wolves (n = 12) and dogs (n = 14) living in packs under the same conditions. To explore developmental effects, we compared these dogs to pet dogs (n = 12) living in human families. The animals were faced with a series of object-choice tasks, in which their response to communicative, behavioural and causal cues was tested. We observed that wolves outperformed dogs in their ability to follow causal cues, suggesting that domestication altered specific skills relating to this domain, whereas developmental effects had surprisingly no influence. All three groups performed similarly in the communicative and behavioural conditions, suggesting higher ontogenetic flexibility in the two social domains. These differences across cognitive domains need to be further investigated, by comparing domestic and non-domesticated animals living in varying conditions.

In the current study, we investigated the question of whether dogs were sensitive to the information that they themselves had or had not acquired. For this purpose, we conducted three consecutive experiments in which dogs had to find a reward that was hidden behind one of two V-shaped fences with a gap at the point of the V. This setup allowed us to distinguish between selecting one of the fences by walking around it and seeking additional information by checking through the gap in the fence. We varied whether dogs had visual access to the baiting procedure or not. In addition, we manipulated the type and quality of reward as well as the time delay between baiting and choosing to analyze if the dogs’ searching behavior was affected. Our results were partly consistent with the findings of Call (Animal Cognition, 13 (5), 689–700, 2010) with great apes, on whose findings we based our experiments. We found that dogs checked more often through the corner of the V-shaped fence when they had not seen where the reward was hidden. Interestingly, dogs rewarded with toys selected the correct fence more often than dogs rewarded with food. Even though dogs’ performance was not affected by the food quality condition, dogs were significantly faster in fetching a high-quality food reward as opposed to a low-quality food reward. When testing whether forgetting and checking would increase as a function of delay, we found that although dogs slightly decreased in their success in finding the food when time delays were longer, they were not more likely to check before choosing. We show that – similar to apes – dogs seek additional information in uncertain situations, but their behavior in uncertain situations is less flexible compared to great apes.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.3758/s13420-018-0367-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Using the comparative approach, researchers draw inferences about the evolution of cognition. Psychologists have postulated several hypotheses to explain why certain species are cognitively more flexible than others, and these hypotheses assume that certain cognitive skills are linked together to create a generally “smart” species. However, empirical findings suggest that several animal species are highly specialized, showing exceptional skills in single cognitive domains while performing poorly in others. Although some cognitive skills may indeed overlap, we cannot a priori assume that they do across species. We argue that the term “cognition” has often been used by applying an anthropocentric viewpoint rather than a biocentric one. As a result, researchers tend to overrate cognitive skills that are human-like and assume that certain skills cluster together in other animals as they do in our own species. In this paper, we emphasize that specific physical and social environments create selection pressures that lead to the evolution of certain cognitive adaptations. Skills such as following the pointing gesture, tool-use, perspective-taking, or the ability to cooperate evolve independently from each other as a concrete result of specific selection pressures, and thus have appeared in distantly related species. Thus, there is not “one cognition”. Our argument is founded upon traditional Darwinian thinking, which—although always at the forefront of biology—has sometimes been neglected in animal cognition research. In accordance with the biocentric approach, we advocate a broader empirical perspective as we are convinced that to better understand animal minds, comparative researchers should focus much more on questions and experiments that are ecologically valid. We should investigate nonhuman cognition for its own sake, not only in comparison to the human model.

Inter-specific emotion recognition is especially adaptive when species spend a long time in close association, like dogs and humans. Here, we comprehensively studied the human ability to recognize facial expressions associated with dog emotions (hereafter, emotions). Participants were presented with pictures of dogs, humans and chimpanzees, showing angry, fearful, happy, neutral and sad emotions, and had to assess which emotion was shown, and the context in which the picture had been taken. Participants were recruited among children and adults with different levels of general experience with dogs, resulting from different personal (i.e. dog ownership) and cultural experiences (i.e. growing up or being exposed to a cultural milieu in which dogs are highly valued and integrated in human lives). Our results showed that some dog emotions such as anger and happiness are recognized from early on, independently of experience. However, the ability to recognize dog emotions is mainly acquired through experience. In adults, the probability of recognizing dog emotions was higher for participants grown up in a cultural milieu with a positive attitude toward dogs, which may result in different passive exposure, interest or inclination toward this species.

Der Band stellt Schlüsselbegriffe der Public History vor und erschließt diese über die wichtigsten Themenfelder und zentrale Forschungsperspektiven. Er richtet sich an Studierende, Lehrende und Praktiker:innen, die sich mit Geschichte in der Öffentlichkeit befassen und bietet Zugänge zur theoretischen Fundierung der Public History als Teil der historischen Kulturwissenschaften an.

When dogs interact with humans, they often show appropriate reactions to human intentional action. But it is unclear from these everyday observations whether the dogs simply respond to the action outcomes or whether they are able to discriminate between different categories of actions. Are dogs able to distinguish intentional human actions from unintentional ones, even when the action outcomes are the same? We tested dogs’ ability to discriminate these action categories by adapting the so-called “Unwilling vs. Unable” paradigm. This paradigm compares subjects’ reactions to intentional and unintentional human behaviour. All dogs received three conditions: In the unwilling-condition, an experimenter intentionally withheld a reward from them. In the two unable-conditions, she unintentionally withheld the reward, either because she was clumsy or because she was physically prevented from giving the reward to the dog. Dogs clearly distinguished in their spontaneous behaviour between unwilling- and unable-conditions. This indicates that dogs indeed distinguish intentional actions from unintentional behaviour. We critically discuss our findings with regard to dogs’ understanding of human intentional action.

There has been a growing interest in the cognitive skills of domestic dogs, but most current knowledge about dogs' understanding of their environment is limited to the visual or auditory modality. Although it is well known that dogs have an excellent olfactory sense and that they rely on olfaction heavily when exploring the environment or recognizing individuals, it remains unclear whether dogs perceive odors as representing specific objects. In the current study, we examined this aspect of dogs' perception of the world. Dogs were presented with a violation-of-expectation paradigm in which they could track the odor trail of one target (Target A), but at the end of the trail, they found another target (Target B). We explored (a) what dogs expect when they smell the trail of an object, (b) how they search for an object, and (c) how their educational background influences their ability to find a hidden object, by comparing family dogs and working dogs that had passed exams for police or rescue dogs. We found that all subjects showed a flexible searching behavior, with the working dogs being more effective but the family dogs learning to be effective over trials. In the first trial, dogs showed measurable signs of "surprise" (i.e., further searching for Target A) when they found Target B, which did not correspond to the odor of Target A from the trail. We conclude that dogs represent what they smell and search flexibly, which is independent from their educational background. (PsycINFO Database Record