Effects of dog´s sociability upon interspecific communicative responses

JAKOVCEVIC, A.; BARRERA, G; ELGIER, A; MUSTACA, A.; BENTOSELA, M.

Melbourne, Florida

Congreso; 19 th Annual International Conference on Comparative Cognition; 2012

Dogs have developed extraordinary interspecific communication skills. Recently, individual differences in communication skills related to breed or training levels have been found in dogs. In this work we studied whether a relationship exists between sociability levels of the dogs and learning interspecific communicative responses. We evaluated adult dogs in a sociability test consisting in the encounter with an unknown human. From these results, animals were divided in two groups: High Sociability (HS) and Low Sociability (LS). In study 1, the dogs were exposed to a conflictive situation where there was food in sight but out of reach. During three trials the gaze response towards the human face was reinforced, followed by three trials of extinction. The study 2 consisted of an object-choice task in which dogs must find hidden food following the direction of the head and the look of a person to the right place. Results showed that HS has longer gaze duration during extinction, compared with LS. In addition, the HS successfully followed the human gaze and find hidden food, resulting in a performance significantly above the chance level, unlike LS whose performance was at chance. In conclusion, the results herein presented suggest that sociability modulates interspecific communication.