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Can dogs generalize what they learned in a cooperative task to new human and conspecific partners?
Ana Grilc
Friederike Range
Jim McGetrick
Masterarbeit - Veterinärmedizinische Universität Wien - 2023
Master thesis - University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna - 2023
Cooperation is defined as two or more individuals acting together towards a common goal (Noë 2006). Cooperative behaviors can occur without the actual understanding of the cooperative action. While humans have outstanding skills to understand their partner’s role and adjust their actions accordingly, cooperative behaviors can occur in other species without actual understanding of the causal role of their partner in the task (Duguid and Melis 2020). To better understand the evolutionary origins of cooperation, research must explore whether individuals from different species understand the role with whom they cooperate or whether they act simultaneously yet independently towards the same goal (Boesch and Boesch 1989, Tomasello and Call 1997). A recent study carried out by Martínez et al. (2023) showed that pet dogs consider the actions of their human partners in a coordination task and adjust their own actions accordingly. However, because dogs participated in this task with their owners as partners, it is possible that their success was due to obedience and leader-follower dynamics, rather than an understanding of the cooperative situation. In the present study we address this question by testing whether those same subjects would be able to keep their success rate when they are not paired with their owner but with a new partner, both human and conspecific. We showed that dogs generalize what they learned with their owner in the previous study also on other partners; either another dog or a human partner they have never met before, and no statistical differences were found when comparing both human and dog partners. This suggests that in Martínez et al. (2023) dogs' performance was not solely based on following their owner’s actions, but rather that they have learned the cooperative nature of the task.
Englisch
2023
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