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      What’s the point? Domestic dogs’ sensitivity to the accuracy of human informants

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          Abstract

          Dogs excel at understanding human social-communicative gestures like points and can distinguish between human informants who vary in characteristics such as knowledge or familiarity. This study explores if dogs, like human children, can use human social informants’ past accuracy when deciding whom to trust. Experiment 1 tested whether dogs would behave differently in the presence of an accurate (vs. inaccurate) informant. Dogs followed an accurate informant’s point significantly above chance. Further, when presented with an inaccurate point, dogs were more likely to ignore it and choose the correct location. Experiment 2 tested whether dogs could use informant past accuracy to selectively follow the point of the previously accurate informant. In test trials when informants simultaneously pointed at different locations (only one of which contained a treat), dogs chose the accurate informant at chance levels. Experiment 3 controlled for non-social task demands (e.g. understanding of hidden baiting and occlusion events) that may have influenced Experiment 2 performance. In test trials, dogs chose to follow the accurate (vs. inaccurate) informant. This suggests that like children, dogs may be able to use informants’ past accuracy when choosing between information sources.

          Supplementary Information

          The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10071-021-01493-5.

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          Most cited references43

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          Social learning strategies.

          In most studies of social learning in animals, no attempt has been made to examine the nature of the strategy adopted by animals when they copy others. Researchers have expended considerable effort in exploring the psychological processes that underlie social learning and amassed extensive data banks recording purported social learning in the field, but the contexts under which animals copy others remain unexplored. Yet, theoretical models used to investigate the adaptive advantages of social learning lead to the conclusion that social learning cannot be indiscriminate and that individuals should adopt strategies that dictate the circumstances under which they copy others and from whom they learn. In this article, I discuss a number of possible strategies that are predicted by theoretical analyses, including copy when uncertain, copy the majority, and copy if better, and consider the empirical evidence in support of each, drawing from both the animal and human social learning literature. Reliance on social learning strategies may be organized hierarchically, their being employed by animals when unlearned and asocially learned strategies prove ineffective but before animals take recourse in innovation.
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            The domestication of social cognition in dogs.

            Dogs are more skillful than great apes at a number of tasks in which they must read human communicative signals indicating the location of hidden food. In this study, we found that wolves who were raised by humans do not show these same skills, whereas domestic dog puppies only a few weeks old, even those that have had little human contact, do show these skills. These findings suggest that during the process of domestication, dogs have been selected for a set of social-cognitive abilities that enable them to communicate with humans in unique ways.
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              A comparative analysis of animals' understanding of the human pointing gesture.

              We review studies demonstrating the ability of some animals to understand the human pointing gesture. We present a 3-step analysis of the topic. (1) We compare and evaluate current experimental methods (2) We compare available experimental results on performance of different species and investigate the interaction of species differences and other independent variables (3) We evaluate how our present understanding of pointing comprehension answers questions about function, evolution and mechanisms. Recently, a number of different hypotheses have been put forward to account for the presence of this ability in some species and for the lack of such comprehension in others. In our view, there is no convincing evidence for the assumption that the competitive lifestyles of apes would inhibit the utilization of this human gesture. Similarly, domestication as a special evolutionary factor in the case of some species falls short in explaining high levels of pointing comprehension in some non-domestic species. We also disagree with the simplistic view of describing the phenomenon as a simple form of conditioning. We suggest that a more systematic comparative research is needed to understand the emerging communicative representational abilities in animals that provide the background for comprehending the human pointing gesture.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                mpelgrim@gmail.com
                Journal
                Anim Cogn
                Anim Cogn
                Animal Cognition
                Springer Berlin Heidelberg (Berlin/Heidelberg )
                1435-9448
                1435-9456
                6 March 2021
                : 1-17
                Affiliations
                [1 ]GRID grid.17063.33, ISNI 0000 0001 2157 2938, The Department of Psychology, , University of Toronto, ; Toronto, ON Canada
                [2 ]GRID grid.40263.33, ISNI 0000 0004 1936 9094, The Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, , Brown University, ; 190 Thayer Street, Buchsbaum Lab, Providence, RI 02912 USA
                [3 ]GRID grid.19822.30, ISNI 0000 0001 2180 2449, The Department of Psychology, , Birmingham City University, ; Birmingham, UK
                [4 ]GRID grid.208226.c, ISNI 0000 0004 0444 7053, The Department of Psychology, , Boston College, ; Boston, MA USA
                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4127-2884
                Article
                1493
                10.1007/s10071-021-01493-5
                7936605
                33675439
                b62cb7c6-9ed9-4c59-95d9-86e08e31d0a5
                © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE part of Springer Nature 2021

                This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic.

                History
                : 7 September 2020
                : 13 January 2021
                : 16 February 2021
                Funding
                Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100002790, Canadian Network for Research and Innovation in Machining Technology, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada;
                Award ID: 05552
                Award Recipient :
                Funded by: FundRef http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100002790, Canadian Network for Research and Innovation in Machining Technology, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada;
                Award ID: 2016
                Award Recipient :
                Categories
                Original Paper

                Animal science & Zoology
                social learning,canine cognition,social cognition,comparative cognition

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