Research at the Wolf Science Center

Our main research topics is cognition and cooperation in wolves and dogs in the context of their relationships with conspecifics and with their human raisers.

The long-standing relationship between wolves and humans may root in their similar hunter-gatherer and scavenging life styles.
Wolf-human interactions developed into close cooperation and intimate relationships between dogs and humans during the course of domestication. Cooperation is at the core of canine social organization, thus making wolf packs and domestic dogs the ideal model species to analyze cooperation with conspecific and human partners.

Collaboration is certainly a fundamental and central aspect of human societies and has triggered much research in

• behavioural biology,
• experimental economics and
• psychology.

Although it is clear that human collaborative skills are exceptional, comparisons with animals may reveal the evolutionary origins and the functional relevance of cooperation. Moreover, such a comparative approach may provide us with the opportunity to understand the proximate mechanisms and the development of cooperation in ontogeny.

Thus, to gain a full insight into the evolutionary, emotional and cognitive processes as well as into the development of cooperation, the main objective of our project is to investigate these aspects of cooperation in an integrative and comparative model.

You will find more information about our research and projects on this page soon.