Communicating with canines

The family dogs turn 11 this year, but I often think of them as little human girls who know enough to recognize that sneaking a mango out of the harvest pile isn’t good behavior, but can’t quite give up their prizes either.

While I’m not the first person to think of a pet in people terms, recent studies from Hungarian researchers suggest there may be some truth to the way I view dogs. In the February 7 print edition of the journal Current Biology, the team demonstrated that dogs can pick up communication cues from people in behaviors likened to those seen in human babies.

“Our findings reveal that dogs are receptive to human communication in a manner that was previously attributed only to human infants,” said study senior author József Topál of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in a statement. “By following the eye movements of dogs, we are able to get a firsthand look at how their minds are actually working.”

The team tracked the eye movements of nearly 30 pet dogs who were made to watch videos of a person standing between two flower pots. In one video, the person would look straight at the camera and say “Hi dog!” before directing her gaze to one of the pots. In the other video, the person would look at the ground when greeting the dog, but would then raise her head to look at a flower pot.

The researchers found that the dogs who watched the video in which the model looked directly at the camera and seemed to directly address the animals were more likely to follow her lead and stare at the same flower pot she picked compared to the dogs who saw the other video.

A separate article from study co-author Gabriella Lakatos listed several possible reasons for the dog’s ability to understand human gestures. Published last year in an Italian journal, many of the given reasons revolve around the animal’s social interactions with people as it was tamed into a human pet and companion over time.

“In the case of companion animals living [in] close relationship with the humans like dogs and cats it could have great importance to be able to live together without problems,” she noted. Additional studies from her own group suggest, she said, that in learning more about each other dogs and humans undergo a similar learning curve in which the animals and children under the age of 3 learn to recognize basic gestures for communication.

American psychologists took a slightly different approach to testing whether or not the long process of making the dog a pet affected the animal’s abilities to read human social cues. In a study that appeared in the journal Learning & Behavior last year, the researchers worked with several dogs, some pets and others from animal shelters, and several hand-raised though untamed wolves, which represented the dogs before they had been domesticated into pets.

In an experiment similar to the one done by the Hungarian team, a dog or hand-raised wolf was called by two people standing directly in front of him with food though only one of the pair would offer treats. One of the testers faced the animal, in some instances holding a book or something similar to block his face, while the other faced away from the animal during the entire test.

The researchers wanted to find out if the dogs and wolves would behave similarly during the trials. Similar results might suggest, for example, that the dogs had learned to understand human communication cues long before the animals were domesticated. The group found that some learned behaviors influenced the results; compared to the wolves, the pets were more likely to recognize that they were being called even when the people were hidden behind a book. Overall the findings back the idea that dogs respond best to the social cues they’re used to recognizing in their normal environments, though these behaviors aren’t solely due to the process of domestication.

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