Clever hounds: social cognition in the domestic dog (Canis familiaris)

By J. Cooper, Clare F. Ashton, Sarah Bishop, R. E. West, Daniel Mills, R. J. Young. 2003

165 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper reviews the reasons why domestic dogs make good models to investigate cognitive processes related to social living and describes experimental approaches that can be adopted to investigate such processes in dogs. Domestic dogs are suitable models for investigating social cognition skills for three broad reasons. First, dogs originated from wolves, social animals that engage in a number of co-operative behaviours, such as hunting and that may have evolved cognitive abilities that help them predict and interpret the actions of other animals. Second, during domestication dogs are likely to have been selected for mental adaptations for their roles in human society such as herding or companionship. Third, domestic dogs live in a human world and “enculturation” may facilitate the development of relevant mental skills in dogs. Studies of social cognition in animals commonly use experimental paradigms originally developed for pre-verbal human infants. Preferential gaze, for example, can be used as a measure of attention or “surprise” in studies using expectancy violation. This approach has been used to demonstrate simple numerical competence in dogs. Dogs also readily use both conspecific and human social signals (e.g. looking or pointing) as information sources to locate hidden rewards such as food or favourite toys. Such abilities make dogs particularly good models for investigating perspective-taking tasks, where animals are required to discriminate between apparently knowledgeable and apparently ignorant informants.

Subfields: Genetics, Pharmacy, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/867d689dd56301b05a4124bacc5512d574e8b1a2

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Citations in the corpus

Smelling more or less: Investigating the olfactory experience of the domestic dog (2013, unknown): “By contrast, the cognition of companion dogs has recently received much attention, mostly through studies of the physical cognition and (especially) the social cognitive abilities of the dog (Cooper et al., 2003), such as their use of human gaze for information (Agnetta, Hare, & Tomasello, 2000), th”
The world from a dog's point of view (2013, unknown): “This bias occurs with both owners and strangers as the signalers (Marshall-Pescini, Prato-Previde, & Valsecchi, 2011), and has also been observed when the signaler is a dog (Cooper et al., 2003).”
Visual perspective taking in dogs (Canis familiaris) in the presence of barriers (2004, background): “For instance, Cooper et al. (2003) found that dogs prefer to select a container indicated by a human that had witnessed the baiting compared to a human who had not seen the baiting ( Cooper et al., 2003 ).”
Numerical competence in animals, with an insight from ants (2011, background): “, 2008; Gómez-Laplaza & Gerlai, 2010) and birds (Emmerton, 2001) to dogs (Cooper et al., 2003), elephants (Irie-Sugimoto et al.”
Effects of breed, sex, and neuter status on trainability in dogs (2005, background): “Recent experimental studies have confirmed that domestic dogs exhibit heightened sensitivity and responsiveness to human social cues and communication signals, and that they perform consistently better than either hand-reared wolves or chimpanzees on human-guided tasks (Agnetta, Hare and Tomasello 2”
Breed Differences in Domestic Dogs' (Canis familiaris) Comprehension of Human Communicative Signals (2009, background): “Domestic dogs are unusually skilled at reading human social and communicative behaviors when compared to other nonhumans (Cooper et al 2003, Hare and Tomasello 2005, Miklosi et al 2005).”
The domestication hypothesis for dogs' skills with human communication: a response to Udell et al. (2008) and Wynne et al. (2008) (2010, background): “Dogs across a range of breeds use human communicative cues such as pointing or physical markers to find food that is hidden in one of two hiding places (controls rule out the use of olfactory cues; Cooper et al. 2003; Hare & Tomasello 2005; Miklosi & Soproni 2006).”
Meaning = Life (+ Culture): An outline of a unified biocultural theory of meaning (2001, background): “…(and even there they are still contested, see below) at least two very different species have been argued at least to approach a higher meaning level than here suggested: domesticated dogs (Canis familiaris), (Cooper et. al, 2003) and grey parrots (Psittacus erthacus), (Pepperberg, 2001, 2002).”
The dog as a model for understanding human social behavior (2009, background): “After the hiding both the ‘‘Knower’’ and another human who could not see the hiding (the ‘‘Guesser’’) appoint one of the hiding places by their behavior and the dog is allowed to choose one of the hiding places (Cooper et al., 2003).”