SOCIABILIDAD Y COMUNICACIÓN ENTRE PERROS DOMESTICOS (CANIS FAMILIARIS) Y HUMANOS

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

Almería, España

Congreso; XXII CONGRESO DE LA SOCIEDAD ESPAÑOLA DE PSICOLOGÍA COMPARADA XXII CONGRESS OF THE SPANISH SOCIETY FOR COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY; 2010

Several evidences suggest that in conflictive situations, dogs gaze at the human face. The objective of the present study was to evaluate whether there are differences between dogs that differ in their levels of sociability towards people, in the learning of the gaze response in a situation involving food at sight but out of reach. The hypothesis indicates that the most social animals would gaze more to the human. With this aim, adult dogs were evaluated with two procedures: (a) an encounter with an unknown person, where the duration of physical contact with her was measured and (b) a communicative task involving three trials of differential reinforcement of the dog’s gaze to the experimenter’s face to ask for food, followed by three extinction trials. The results indicated that those dogs with more physical contact during the sociability test gazed significantly more to the experimenter during extinction even when this response did not lead to the food. This suggests that for the most social animals, compared with the less sociable ones, the presence of the person would be reinforcing and they would pay more attention to it, being thus more resistant to the extinction of communicative responses.