Dogs distinguish human intentional and unintentional action

Abstract

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.

Unwilling or Unable? Using 3D tracking to evaluate dogs’ reactions to differing human intentions

“…This expectation to obtain the food possibly could explain their greater patience following the clumsy demonstration. The fact that the dogs could not directly approach the dropped food (as in [35]) alleviates this caveat to some extent.…”

“…Trösch et al [11] found that horses left earlier and spent less time in proximity in the blocked condition than in the clumsy condition. In contrast, Schünemann et al [35] changed the setup such that the dogs actually could walk around the barrier to approach the experimenter directly. They found that the latency of walking around the barrier was the shortest in the blocked condition, followed by the clumsy condition and then the teasing condition.…”

“…Seven additional dogs were tested but excluded because they were too young (<10 months; N=3) or because they did not take the food directly from the experimenter (N=4). The sample size was preregistered and based on a previous unwilling-unable study with dogs [35]. The study was discussed and approved by the institutional ethics and animal welfare committee in accordance with GSP guidelines and national legislation (approval number: ETK-028/02/2021).…”

“…A recent study found evidence that also dogs (N=51) distinguished between human actions signalling unwillingness or inability [35]. In contrast to the previous unwilling-unable studies, the dogs could walk around the barrier to approach the experimenter directly (the dogs were familiarised with this response prior to the test).…”

“…In the current pre-registered study, our goal was three-fold: first, we examined whether dogs indeed differentiate between actions signalling unwillingness vs. inability even if they cannot approach the experimenter or the dropped food (clumsy condition) directly (cf. [35]). Second, we investigated whether this distinction could also be identified without a human observer manually scoring the videos using machine-learning driven 3D tracking [36].…”