Human-like social skills in dogs?

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2005.07.003

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Volume 9, Issue 9, September 2005, Pages 439-444

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2005.07.003 Get rights and content

Domestic dogs are unusually skilled at reading human social and communicative behavior – even more so than our nearest primate relatives. For example, they use human social and communicative behavior (e.g. a pointing gesture) to find hidden food, and they know what the human can and cannot see in various situations. Recent comparisons between canid species suggest that these unusual social skills have a heritable component and initially evolved during domestication as a result of selection on systems mediating fear and aggression towards humans. Differences in chimpanzee and human temperament suggest that a similar process may have been an important catalyst leading to the evolution of unusual social skills in our own species. The study of convergent evolution provides an exciting opportunity to gain further insights into the evolutionary processes leading to human-like forms of cooperation and communication.

Section snippets

Human-like social skills in dogs?

The test is simple. Hide a piece of food or an attractive object in one of several opaque containers, and then look at or point to that location in an attempt to help the subject find the hidden object. Human infants find this task trivially easy from around 14 months of age, as they are just beginning to learn language [5]. However, perhaps surprisingly, chimpanzees, so impressive in solving so many other social problems, show little skill in using such social-communicative behaviors to solve

Convergent cognitive evolution in dogs and humans?

The fact that domestic dogs possess certain human-like social skills that non-human apes do not raises the question of their origin. Could it be that the similarities between dogs and humans represent a case of convergent cognitive evolution? There are three obvious explanations, and they have been explored by comparing the use of basic human social-communicative behaviors (i.e. a pointing or gaze cue directed to the location of a hidden object; see Figure 1) both within and between various

Implications for human cognitive evolution

This recent comparative work suggests that human-like social intelligence could initially have evolved, not as an adaptation, but rather as a by-product of selection on seemingly unrelated social-emotional systems – perhaps supported primarily by limbic and endocrine systems rather than the neocortex. Is there any evidence to suggest that humans' social and communicative abilities might have begun to evolve in this way? One prediction of this ‘emotional reactivity’ hypothesis is that the social

Summary

It would seem that our canine companions have come to join in the human conversation in some unique and telling ways. The abilities that enable them to do this – particularly those relating to ‘reading’ human communicative behavior – evolved, at least initially, as a by-product of domestication and converge with those found in our own species. Further investigations into the ways in which dogs do and do not communicate with humans – and how they come to have their special social skills –

Acknowledgements

The research of the first author is supported by a Sofja Kovalevskaja award received from The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research. We would like to thank Josep Call, Juliane Bräuer, Juliane Kaminski, Marc Hauser and Richard Wrangham for many interesting discussion about many of the ideas in the article. We also thank Vanessa Woods, the TICS editor and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this

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Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Human-like social skills in dogs?

Section snippets

Human-like social skills in dogs?

Convergent cognitive evolution in dogs and humans?

Implications for human cognitive evolution

Summary

Acknowledgements

Anim. Behav.

Appl. Anim. Behav. Sci.

Behav. Processes

Appl. Anim. Behav. Sci.

Trends Cogn. Sci.

Anim. Behav.

Anim. Behav.

Curr. Biol.

Applied Animal Ethology

Curr. Biol.

Anim. Behav.

Anim. Behav.

Trends Cogn. Sci.

Appl. Anim. Behav. Sci.

Pharmacol. Biochem. Behav.

On the Origin of Species

Communication of food location between human and dog (Canis familiaris)

Evolution of Communication

Use of experimenter-given cues in dogs

Anim. Cogn.

Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) use human and conspecific social cues to locate hidden food

J. Comp. Psychol.

Cues to food location that domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) of different ages do and do not use

Anim. Cogn.

Use of human-given cues by domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) and horses (Equus caballus)

Anim. Cogn.

The domestication of social cognition in dogs

Science

Comprehension of seeing as a referential act in young children but not juvenile chimpanzees

Br. J. Dev. Psychol.

Comprehension of human communicative signs in pet dogs (Canis familiaris)

J. Comp. Psychol.

Intentional behavior in dog-human communication: an experimental analysis of “showing” behavior in the dog

Anim. Cogn.

Are readers of our face readers of our minds? Dogs (Canis familiaris) show situation-dependent recognition of human's attention

Anim. Cogn.

What young chimpanzees know about seeing

Monogr. Soc. Res. Child Dev.

Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) are sensitive to the attentional state of humans

J. Comp. Psychol.

Body orientation and face orientation: two factors controlling apes' begging behavior from humans

Anim. Cogn.