Gaze following abilities in wolves

Research Blog, 25.02.2011, Friederike Range

Tiere, die den Blicken anderer folgen, erhalten damit wichtige Informationen für soziale Interaktionen und für ihr Überleben. Doch nur wenige Arten wie Menschenaffen oder Raben besitzen die kognitiven Fähigkeiten, dies auch zu tun, wenn man sich um einer Barriere herumbewegen muss, um zu sehen, was der andere sieht. Nun konnten wir zeigen, dass Wölfe auch zu diesen Arten gehören.

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The summary of our second publication you can find here.

By Friederike Range & Zsofia Viranyi

Following others’ gaze direction is an important source of information that helps to detect prey or predators, to notice important social events within one’s social group and to predict the next actions of others. As such, it is considered a key step towards an understanding of the others’ mental states like attention and intention.
We found that hand-raised wolves readily detoured an obstacle in order to check where a conspecific or human demonstrator was looking at; indicating that gaze following around a barrier is not restricted to primates and corvids. They, however, quickly stopped responding to repeated looks if they found nothing interesting on the other side of the barrier.
On the contrary, they did not habituate to repeated looks of a human demonstrator into distant space, supporting the idea that the two gaze following modalities have different underlying cognitive mechanisms.
These new data shed light on the evolutionary origins of gaze following abilities and help us hypothesize about the selective pressures shaping such fine-tuned attentional coordination in social animals.