The performance of stray dogs (Canis familiaris) living in a shelter on human-guided object-choice tasks

Can your dog read your mind? Understanding the causes of canine perspective taking

“…This is not to say that dogs living in a shelter could not learn to make the appropriate response, given additional training; in fact, it has been demonstrated that dogs living in a shelter can learn to utilize even a challenging human point to locate a target rapidly if given additional exposure to the task (Udell, Dorey, & Wynne 2010a). What our results do suggest is that even for healthy, human-socialized dogs, life experiences common to strays or a shelter environment predict a different initial level of responsiveness to stimuli that predict a human's attentional state or willingness to provide reinforcement than is found in pet dogs.…”

When dogs look back: inhibition of independent problem-solving behaviour in domestic dogs ( Canis lupus familiaris ) compared with wolves ( Canis lupus )

“…Lett. 11: 20150489 current living environment [2]. It should be noted that in a pilot study an eight-week-old puppy was able to open the puzzle box, thus failure was unlikely due to physical limitations.…”

“…a history of scolding for independently obtaining food items), shelter dogs might represent an intermediate group-showing greater social sensitivity than wolves, but less than pet dogs-owing to reduced human interaction in the shelter setting. Prior studies have shown that dogs living in a shelter are initially less responsive to some human gestures than pets [2]; therefore, it is possible that human presence would have less of an influence on their problem-solving performance as well.…”

“…While individual and population variation exists [1,2], pet dogs have demonstrated the capacity to respond to a wide range of human gestures and actions [3]. There is also evidence that human-socialized wolves can succeed on tasks requiring the use of human gestures [4].…”

Domesticated dogs (Canis familiaris) react to what others can and cannot hear

“…For example, Udell et al recently found that shelter dogs failed to follow a momentary distal point cue (i.e., the experimenter briefly exhibited a traditional pointing gesture in the direction of the baited container) to find food while pet dogs tested indoors and wolves (Canis lupus) did. In a subsequent study, Udell et al (2010) found that shelter dogs were able to learn to follow a momentary distal point after further training. However, in our experiment, a dog's life history did not appear to affect the dog's propensity to take into account what a human gatekeeper could and could not hear.…”