Our first publication

Research Blog, 05.09.2009, Friederike Range

Done! Together with our close cooperation partners in Hungary we published our first paper about pointing in wolves and dogs in the journal Plos one. Kaspar, Aragirn and Shima worked hard for this study!

View the slideshow (1 image)   

Here you find a summary of the study

Explaining Dog Wolf Differences in Utilizing Human Pointing Gestures: Selection for Synergistic Shifts in the Development of Some Social Skills

Márta Gácsi, Borbála Győri, Zsófia Virányi, Enikő Kubinyi, Friederike Range, Beatrix Belényi & Ádám Miklósi

Background
The comparison of human related communication skills of socialized canids may help to understand the evolution and the epigenesis of gesture comprehension in humans. To reconcile previously contradicting views on the origin of the outstanding performance of dogs in utilising human gestures, we suggest that dog-wolf differences should be studied in a more complex way.

Methodology/Principal Findings
We present data both on the performance and the behaviour of dogs and wolves of different ages in a two-way object choice test.
Characteristic behavioural differences were present between the two species in all age categories. For wolves it took longer to establish eye contact with the pointing experimenter, they struggled more with the handler, and pups also bit her more before focusing on the human’s signal.
The performance of similarly hand-reared 8-week-old dogs and wolves did not differ in utilizing a simpler human signal, proximal momentary pointing. However, when tested with the distal momentary pointing, 4-month-old pet dogs outperformed the same aged hand reared wolves.These findings show that early and intensive socialisation is not sufficient to diminish differences between young dogs and young wolves in behaviour and performance. Socialised adult wolves, however, performed similarly well as dogs in this task without pretraining. The success of adult wolves was accompanied with increased willingness to cooperate with the humans in the task.

Conclusion/Significance
Thus, we provide evidence for the first time that socialised adult wolves are as successful in relying on distal momentary pointing as adult pet dogs. However, the delayed emergence of utilising human distal momentary pointing in wolves shows that these wild canines react to a lesser degree to intensive socialisation in contrast to dogs, which are able to display control of agonistic behaviours and inhibition of actions in a food related task early in development.
Results support our “synergistic” hypothesis, suggesting that positive feedback processes (both evolutionary and ontogenetic) increased the readiness of dogs to attend to humans, providing the basis for complex forms of dog-human communication.

To read the full article, click here.