Practice makes perfect: familiarity of task determines success in solvable tasks for free-ranging dogs (Canis lupus familiaris)

Abstract

Domestic dogs' (Canis lupus familiaris) socio-cognitive faculties have made them highly sensitive to human social cues. While dogs often excel at understanding human communicative gestures, they perform comparatively poorly in problem-solving and physical reasoning tasks. This difference in their behaviour could be due to the lifestyle and intense socialization, where problem solving and physical cognition are less important than social cognition. Free-ranging dogs live in human-dominated environments, not under human supervision and are less socialized. Being scavengers, they often encounter challenges where problem solving is required in order to get access to food. We tested Indian street dogs in familiar and unfamiliar independent solvable tasks and quantified their persistence and dependence on a novel human experimenter, in addition to their success in solving a task. Our results indicate that free-ranging dogs succeeded and persisted more in the familiar task as compared to the unfamiliar one. They showed negligible amount of human dependence in the familiar task, but showed prolonged gazing and considerable begging behaviour to the human experimenter in the context of the unfamiliar task. Cognitive abilities of free-ranging dogs thus play a pivotal role in determining task-associated behaviours based on familiarity. In addition to that, these dogs inherently tend to socialize with and depend on humans, even if they are strangers. Our results also illustrate free-ranging dogs' low competence at physical cognitive tasks.

Cooperation, only for high rewards – a solvable task-based study on free-ranging dogs

“…Our study revealed that free-ranging dog groups performed better in the familiar task (Task 2) as compared to the unfamiliar one (Task 1) when faced with tasks with single food rewards. This was consistent with the earlier findings with individual free-ranging dogs and further substantiates dogs’ inferior abilities in physical cognitive task solving situations like string pulling (Osthaus et al 2005; Bhattacharjee et al 2017a). Dogs also showed a much faster reaction to Task 2 than Task 1, emphasizing the role of familiarity (Bhattacharjee et al 2017a).…”

“…Task 1 had earlier been shown to be solved by individual free-ranging dogs, suggesting no physical limitation on part of the dogs. However, a small success rate could be addressed by ‘task difficulty’ along with unfamiliarity, also, Task 2 was highly familiar for these dogs from a scavenging perspective and solved at a higher rate compared to Task 1 (Bhattacharjee et al 2017a). In order to eliminate any anthropomorphic bias, we have emphasized the familiarity of the tasks (Task 1 and 2), rather than their difficulty levels.…”

“…It required the dogs to obtain food from a transparent plastic container (0.11 m × 0.11 m × 0.06 m) that had a hole pierced in one corner of the lid through which a nylon rope (length – 0.2 m) had been inserted and attached such that pulling the rope could open the lid of the box. In an earlier experiment, individual free-ranging dogs have been observed to attempt the task but failed to solve it on most occasions (Udell 2015; Brubaker et al 2017; Bhattacharjee et al 2017a). Hence this task was considered to be suitable for testing if group members would cooperate to solve the task.…”

“…In this task, we provided dog groups with a piece of raw chicken as a reward, placed inside a transparent plastic bag (0.19 m × 0.11 m). The experimenter allowed dogs of the focal group to sniff the chicken piece before placing it inside the plastic bag and tying the mouth of the bag with a thread, allowing the dogs to watch the process (Bhattacharjee et al 2017a). All the other steps were as in Task 1 and the response was recorded for 120 seconds.…”

“…Unfortunately, studies are greatly lacking pertaining to free-ranging dogs’ group performance and cooperation in problem-solving situations, which could give us insights into the maintenance of group cohesiveness and social hierarchy. Individual free-ranging dogs have been shown to depend on humans when faced with an unfamiliar task, exhibiting proximity-seeking and gazing behaviours (Bhattacharjee et al 2017a). While it is essential to test their behaviours individually, it is also necessary to investigate the group responses to check if the dogs seek help from group members in similar situations and if members of a group help each other to solve a task and share food.…”