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

Abstract

This study investigates whether dogs are able to differentiate between people according to whether or not they show similarities to their owners. We hypothesized that dogs would show a preference for the "similar" partner when interacting with unfamiliar humans. After having familiarized with two experimenters displaying different degrees of similarity to their owners, dogs (N = 36) participated in a situation where the desired toy object was made inaccessible in order to find out whether they initiate interaction with the two partners differently. Two different types of "similarity cues" were used (either alone or combined with each other): (1) persistent behavioral characteristics (i.e., familiar vs. strange motion pattern and language usage) and (2) an unfamiliar arbitrary group marker (i.e., one of the potential helpers was wearing clothing similar to that worn by the owner). Results show that although dogs payed equal attention to the human partners displaying various types of similarity to their owners during familiarization, they exhibited a visual attention preference for the human whose motion pattern and language usage were similar to their owner's in the inaccessible-toy task. However, there was weak evidence of discrimination based on the arbitrary group marker (clothing). Although dogs' different tendencies to interact with the potential helpers do not necessarily imply an underlying ability to create social categories based on the degree of similarity between the owner and unfamiliar people, these results suggest that functionally human infant-analogue forms of social categorization may have emerged in dogs.

Asking for help: Do dogs take into account prior experiences with people?

“…In line with this, as most dogs were owned by females, it is possible that they generalized Fig. 2 Mean and standard error of the time in seconds that dogs spent gazing at the experimenter during the unsolvable tasks as a function of the experimenter's ID and attitude Table 4 Mean (in bold) and standard deviations (s) of the behaviors assessed their learnt responses with their owner to the female E. This interpretation is in accordance with the results from Kiss et al (2018), which showed that dogs preferred to interact with those experimenters who shared some behavioral attitudes with their owners. Nevertheless, this must be interpreted with caution, as we did not find a direct effect of the owner's gender on dogs' choices.…”

“…In contrast to these findings, Kiss, Kovács, Szánthó, and Topál (2018) investigated whether dogs were able to differentiate between unfamiliar people according to their similarity to their owners. To this end, they were confronted with people who either acted as their owner (i.e., behavioral characteristics including language and motion patterns) or wore a similar piece of clothing to one worn by the owner (i.e., unfamiliar arbitrary group marker).…”

The influence of voice familiarity and linguistic content on dogs’ ability to follow human voice direction

“…This together with the finding that dogs prefer to work with “in-group” humans (c.f. 28 ) might explain their relatively poor pointing-following performance in our study. Importantly, in the present study all subjects participated in four different conditions, thus they completed a relatively large number of experimental trials (e.g.…”

“…But our study also revealed that dogs performed more successfully in conditions involving potentially relevant auditory cues (meaningful content with dog-directed intonation) by a socially relevant human companion (the owner). An earlier study by Kiss et al concluded that dogs are more prone to interact in a fetching task upon receiving cues from a person similar to their owners 28 . Moreover, the average latency of response was also found to be the lowest in the owner-involved task.…”

“…Others, however, have found no performance difference in a food choice task depending on the demonstrator being the owner versus the experimenter 31 . Dogs have also been shown 28 to prefer a human partner similar to their owner in an unsolvable problem task—they were less prone to cooperate with an experimenter with strange motion pattern and language usage. In our study the experimenter had a foreign accent (non-native Hungarian which might have influenced dogs’ understanding of commands), thus this “out-group” effect might have contributed to the observed differences between conditions.…”