Dogs' recognition of human selfish and generous attitudes requires little but critical experience with people

CARBALLO, F; BENTOSELA M.; CASSANAVE; FREIDIN, E.

PLOS ONE

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE

Lugar: San Francisco; Año: 2017 vol. 12 p. 1 - 16

1932-6203

There is some dispute regarding the role of experience in the development of dogs sociocognitiveabilities in their interaction with people. We sought to provide new evidence to thisdebate by comparing dogs with contrasting levels of experience with humans, in a taskinvolving the discrimination of human generous and selfish attitudes. To this end, we comparedthe performance of adult family dogs against that of adult shelter dogs and puppies livingin peopleÂs homes. In training trials, the generous experimenter (G) signaled the bowlwith food and allowed the dog to eat, whereas the selfish experimenter (S) also signaled thebaited bowl, but she/he ate the food before the dog could have access to it. Then, subjectswere allowed to freely choose between G and S in the choice test. The main finding was thatadult subjects (both family and shelter dogs) developed a preference for G over S, but puppiesdid not. We conclude that the quality and/or quantity of everyday-contact with peopledid not affect the discrimination of human attitudes in the present protocol, but the amount ofexperience with people (in years) did matter. Finally, we discuss the relative role of domesticationand ontogeny in the development of dogs socio-cognitive abilities.