Dog’s Discrimination of Human Selfish and Generous Attitudes: The Role of Individual Recognition, Experience, and Experimenters’ Gender

Abstract

Discrimination of and memory for others’ generous and selfish behaviors could be adaptive abilities in social animals. Dogs have seemingly expressed such skills in both direct and indirect interactions with humans. However, recent studies suggest that their capacity may rely on cues other than people’s individual characteristics, such as the place where the person stands. Thus, the conditions under which dogs recognize individual humans when solving cooperative tasks still remains unclear. With the aim of contributing to this problem, we made dogs interact with two human experimenters, one generous (pointed towards the food, gave ostensive cues, and allowed the dog to eat it) and the other selfish (pointed towards the food, but ate it before the dog could have it). Then subjects could choose between them (studies 1-3). In study 1, dogs took several training trials to learn the discrimination between the generous and the selfish experimenters when both were of the same gender. In study 2, the discrimination was learned faster when the experimenters were of different gender as evidenced both by dogs’ latencies to approach the bowl in training trials as well as by their choices in preference tests. Nevertheless, dogs did not get confused by gender when the experimenters were changed in between the training and the choice phase in study 3. We conclude that dogs spontaneously used human gender as a cue to discriminate between more and less cooperative experimenters. They also relied on some other personal feature which let them avoid being confused by gender when demonstrators were changed. We discuss these results in terms of dogs’ ability to recognize individuals and the potential advantage of this skill for their lives in human environments.

Similarity between an unfamiliar human and the owner affects dogs’ preference for human partner when responding to an unsolvable problem

“…Dogs, like young children, are sophisticated social learners; they have a unique ability to perceive and respond to human communicative gestures and emotions (see Topál, Kis, & Oláh, 2014, for a review) and are able to use personal features as cues to discriminate between unfamiliar humans in order to find the most likely cooperative human partner (Carballo et al, 2015). Although the extent to which human infants rely on associative learning as a fundamental process underlying social category-based thinking is still unclear and calls for further investigation (Paolini, Harris, & Griffin, 2015), results from the current study raise the hypothesis that, functionally, human infant analogue forms of social categorization may have emerged in dogs.…”

“…The capacity to recognize people even after short interactions is a fundamental aspect of social categorization, which is likely to be expressed naturally by dogs. Although there remain some inconsistencies in the evidence, dogs appear able to categorize people based on gender (Ratcliffe, McComb, & Reby, 2014) or other personal features of their potential human partner (Carballo et al, 2015but see Freidin, Putrino, D'Orazio, & Bentosela, 2013, as well as based on earlier observation of human behavior (observing third-party interactions; e.g., Rooney & Bradshaw, 2006; but see Nitzschner, Melis, Kaminski, & Tomasello, 2012).…”

The Origin of Social Evaluation, Social Eavesdropping, Reputation Formation, Image Scoring or What You Will

“…Recently Carballo et al (2015) investigated further whether dogs are able to discriminate between prosocial and antisocial humans after direct experience. The humans pointed at one of two bowls in front of the dog that contained food.…”

Do dogs mind the dots? Investigating domestic dogs' (Canis familiaris) preferential looking at human‐shaped point‐light figures

“…Probably, most dogs may have certain experience with either female or male owners and therefore react differently to the masculinity of the presented PLFs—which differs between male PLF and female PLFs based on the form and the movement (Pollick, Kay, Heim, & Stringer, 2005). Previous research already showed that familiarity with the sex of the owner influenced dogs' capability of detecting behavioural and emotional signals from humans of the same or different sex as that of the owner (Carballo et al, 2015; Nagasawa, Murai, Mogi, & Kikusui, 2011).…”

“…Hence, PLFs could be used as useful stimuli in canine visual perception research, including but not limited to social cognition abilities (Ishikawa et al, 2018). Examples include studying irrelevant appearance features of the experimenter or familiarity with the experimenter (Carballo et al, 2015; Kerepesi, Dóka, & Miklósi, 2015; Merola, Prato‐Previde, Lazzaroni, & Marshall‐Pescini, 2014; Wells & Hepper, 1999), the clever Hans effect or facilitated communication (Lit, Schweitzer, & Oberbauer, 2011; Pongrácz, Miklósi, Hegedüs, & Bálint, 2013) and olfactory factors (Horowitz & Franks, 2019). Another venue for further research is to study the cross‐modal representation regarding the sex of the played back sounds (i.e.…”