Canine perspective-taking

Abstract

An important question in the study of canine cognition is how dogs understand humans, given that they show impressive abilities for interacting and communicating with us. In this review, we describe and discuss studies that have investigated dogs’ perspective-taking abilities. There is solid evidence that dogs are not only sensitive to the gaze of others, but also their attention. We specifically address the question whether dogs have the ability to take the perspective of others and thus come to understand what others can or cannot perceive. From the latter, they may then infer what others know and use this representation to anticipate what others do next. Still, dogs might simply rely on directly observable cues and on what they themselves can perceive when they assess what others can perceive. And instead of making inferences from representations of others' mental states, they may have just learned that certain behaviours of ours lead to certain outcomes. However, recent research seems to challenge this low-level explanation. Dogs have solved several perspective-taking tasks instantly and reliably across a large number of variations, including geometrical gaze-following, stealing in the dark, concealing information from others, and Guesser/Knower differentiation. In the latter studies, dogs' choices between two human informants were strongly influenced by cues related to the humans’ visual access to the food, even when the two informants behaved identically. And finally, we review a recent study that found dogs reacting differently to misleading suggestions of human informants that have either a true or false belief about the location of food. We discuss this surprising result in terms of the comprehension of reality-incongruent mental states, which is considered as a hallmark of Theory of Mind acquisition in human development. Especially on the basis of the latter findings, we conclude that pet dogs might be sensitive to what others see, know, intend, and believe. Therefore, this ability seems to have evolved not just in the corvid and primate lineages, but also in dogs.

Zhuangzi and collaboration in animals: a critical conceptual analysis of shared intentionality

“…Furthermore, it might miss the social cognition involved in the aspects of the shared travel in which the dog participates. Dogs can gaze-follow, and look back and forth to pick up ostensive cues about the local environment and where their humans are attending ( Huber and Lonardo 2023 ). This allows the dog to coordinate action sufficient to meet the goals of sub-plans associated with travelling together.…”

Exploring the use of projected videos to test action matching from different perspectives in dogs

“…This species, indeed, showed some success in the Guesser-Knower task, suggesting that geometrical gaze following and perspective-taking may be within dogs' cognitive abilities (Catala et al 2017). However, this topic remains controversial (Huber and Lonardo 2023), and more solid methods would be needed to gain a clearer understanding of the cognitive processes involved in dogs' success in solving tasks relying on perspective-taking (Abdai and Miklósi 2023).…”

Dogs do not use their own experience with novel barriers to infer others’ visual access

“…Outside of the primate lineage, dogs (Canis familiaris) represent an interesting species for the study of ToM abilities in non-human animals [20]. Indeed, they share an evolutionary history of close co-habitation with humans [21], which might make them appropriate models for the study of convergent evolution of socio-cognitive abilities [22][23][24].…”

“…Indeed, they share an evolutionary history of close co-habitation with humans [21], which might make them appropriate models for the study of convergent evolution of socio-cognitive abilities [22][23][24]. Moreover, they show behaviour-reading skills when interacting with humans [20]. Specifically, converging evidence from different paradigms suggests that dogs have a good grasp of humans' behavioural cues connected to 'paying attention' and 'seeing'.…”

“…perceive and remember [4,25]); events: when the humans' eyes are open compared with closed [26]; when the humans orient towards rather than away from a target [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]; when the humans' line of gaze is unobstructed compared with obstructed by different types of barriers [29,31,[35][36][37][38] and when in light compared with when in darkness [39]. While dogs are known for their sense of smell, the aforementioned evidence of dogs' perspective-taking abilities ( [20], for a review) is almost exclusively based on tasks relying on visual stimuli, with a few exceptions using auditory cues. Many studies have even excluded the possibility that odour cues could affect task performance through appropriate controls.…”