Asking for help: Do dogs take into account prior experiences with people?

Abstract

When confronted with a difficult or impossible problem, dogs tend to look back at humans and try to catch their attention, instead of trying to solve it themselves. This behavior has been interpreted as a help request, but it is debated whether dogs take into account prior experiences with people when selecting whom to turn to. In the present study, dogs were trained to discriminate between a generous experimenter who gave them food and a selfish one that took it away. After assessing that they had established a preference for the generous one, we exposed them to an unsolvable task in which food was locked inside a container, while the experimenters stood on each side of the apparatus. During this task, we measured their behaviors towards each experimenter. Results showed that dogs did not first turn to the generous experimenter. However, they gazed more at the generous experimenter during the task, which implies that they did, to some degree, selectively ask for help based on previous interactions. Moreover, they gazed more and spent significantly more time in contact with the female experimenter when she was generous, suggesting a possible synergic effect of the experimenters' ID (male/female) and their attitude (generous/selfish). All in all, these results suggest that, to some extent, dogs are able to use the information from previous interactions with unknown humans to selectively ask for help.Keywords Human reputation . Unsolvable task . Asking for help . Dogs Dogs are particularly skilled at communicating with people, and gazing at the human face plays a fundamental role in this ability (e.g., Prato-Previde & Marshall-Pescini, 2014). One pioneer study that focused on gazing as a communicative signal is that of Miklósi et al. (2003), in which dogs were exposed to two kind of problems: pulling a rope with food attached to

Effect of Sex and Reproductive Status on Inhibitory Control and Social Cognition in the Domestic Dog (Canis familiaris)

“…The gender of the experimenter could also be a contributing factor, since male and female dogs may show a different behavioral response to men compared to women [ 37 , 43 , 84 ]. However, as the tests were always performed by a woman and 95.3% of the owners in our data were female, it was not possible to investigate the effect of human gender on test performance of the dogs.…”

“…In contrast, wolves and other species tend to attempt to solve the problem independently, even when raised with humans from birth [ 35 , 36 ]. The dogs’ human-directed gazing behavior has been interpreted as a social problem-solving strategy, and as a request for help from the human [ 27 , 34 , 37 , 38 ]. This behavior shows individual and breed variation [ 39 ] and seems to also have a genetic component [ 40 , 41 ].…”

Disentangling help-seeking and giving up: differential human-directed gazing by dogs in a modified unsolvable task paradigm

“…Dogs were included if either purebred or crosses between two breeds from within the same target breed group; crossbreeds between different breed groups were excluded. Both experimenters and all included owners were female, since a study indicated that dogs prefer to gaze at women compared to men (Carballo et al 2020 ).…”

“…Conversely, several studies support the notion that dogs’ human-directed gazing in unsolvable tasks is a social-communicative behaviour (Carballo et al 2020 ; Cavalli et al 2020 ; Mendes et al 2021 ). An indication of help-seeking, as opposed to random gazing at salient objects, could be if dogs direct their gaze differentially at the present persons, depending on their current role in the task or past experiences and reinforcement history.…”

Wolves and dogs fail to form reputations of humans after indirect and direct experience in a food-giving situation

“…This demonstrates that dogs distinguished between the cooperative and competitive partner based on their direct experience. Moreover, two studies by Carballo et al [ 17 , 18 ] showed that dogs preferred to approach and gazed more at a generous human than a selfish one in a food-giving situation [ 17 ] and when confronted with an unsolvable task [ 18 ]. However, other studies have found that dogs could not form reputations of humans after direct experience–Piotti et al [ 19 ] could not demonstrate that dogs formed a reputation of an experimenter based on her skilfulness or the quality of the interaction and McGetrick et al [ 20 ] found that dogs did not prefer a helpful human, who provided them with food by activating a food dispenser, compared to an unhelpful human, who did not provide them with food, which suggests that they did not form reputations of the humans based on their cooperativeness.…”