Dogs’ (Canis familiaris) attention to human perception: Influence of breed groups and life experiences.

Abstract

Attending to the perception of others may help individuals gaining information from conspecifics, or help in competitive situations. Dogs (Canis familiaris) are attentive to humans' signals and their attentional state. We investigated whether dogs of different breed groups differ in their ability to pay attention to human's perception, first according to the genetic relatedness between dog breeds, and second according to working style differences. Once dogs had learned to leave forbidden food on the floor, they were confronted with 2 food items to which only they had unrestricted visual access. The owners saw either none or 1 food item through a transparent barrier. Our results showed that dogs pay attention to the perception of humans, whereby differences between breed groups became obvious. Within different genetic groups, ancient and hunting type dogs performed similarly, they were more attentive to their owners' perception than shepherd and the mastiff type dogs. When comparing dogs classified according to their working style, independent workers and family dogs were attentive to the owner's perception, while cooperative workers seemed not. The dogs' choice could not be explained by a general or training induced preference for eating behind an opaque screen, or by an influence of the owner's possible intention to prevent the dog from taking the food item he could see. Our study confirms that dogs are attentive/sensitive to human's perception, but genetic and working style differences among the breeds, as well as dog sport experiences explain part of the variation seen in their performance. (PsycINFO Database Record

Long-term stress in dogs is related to the human–dog relationship and personality traits

“…In contrast to herding dogs, the ancient breeds are thought to be closer genetically to wolves 7 and have not been selected specifically for human cooperation. Also, there are those breeds that are selected for hunting independently, visually separated from the owner, and that have been shown to differ in both their attention as well as behaviour towards humans 8,9 . During hunting seasons in Sweden, there is a tradition of releasing hunting dogs into the forest to let them work on their own.…”

Dogs follow human misleading suggestions more often when the informant has a false belief

“…Previous studies have shown that dogs do not follow human misleading pointing gestures blindly (although sometimes they find them difficult to ignore [50]); instead, they can adjust their behaviour flexibly depending on the trustworthiness of the informant [51] and can discriminate between helpful and uncooperative experimenters [52]. Along this line of argument, it seems plausible to assume that dogs in royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rspb Proc.…”

“…However, only limited attention has been devoted to the empirical investigation of dog breed differences in cognition [67]. An interesting exception is the study by Heberlein et al [68], who found that independent workers and family dogs, when forbidden to eat food, were more skilled at taking their owner's perspective than cooperative workers. Based on the results of experiment 1, we decided to compare dogs considered as cooperative workers (here: border collies) to independent workers (here: terriers) in experiment 3.…”

No evidence for a relationship between breed cooperativeness and inequity aversion in dogs

“…However, cooperative worker and independent worker breeds may not actually differ in cooperativeness. Comparison of cooperative and independent dog breeds has become popular in recent years [69,81,103] but the nature of the behavioural difference that identifies one group as being more cooperative and the other group less cooperative is not clear. It is also important to highlight that cooperative and independent worker breeds were all selected to work for or with humans; thus, they could all be considered cooperative, with variation in the context in which the cooperation occurs rather than the degree of cooperativeness.…”

“…In fact, this categorization system has already elicited criticism (see, for example Udell et al [104]), particularly due to its subjectivity. The fact that differences have been found between these groups in behavioural or cognitive tasks [81,103] suggests that the distinction is meaningful in some sense but further elucidation of the differences between these breeds, and how they relate to cooperativeness, is required.…”