My owner, right or wrong: the effect of familiarity on the domestic dog’s behavior in a food-choice task

Dogs are strongly influenced by human behavior, and they readily form bonds with specific humans. Yet these lines of inquiry are not often combined. The goal of this study was to investigate whether such bonds would play a role in how dogs behave in response to human signals. Using various types of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Animal cognition 2014-03, Vol.17 (2), p.461-470
Main Authors: Cook, Amy, Arter, Jennifer, Jacobs, Lucia F.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal behavior
Animal cognition
Animal Communication
Animal ethology
Animals
Behavioral Sciences
Biological and medical sciences
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Bonding, Human-Pet
Choice Behavior
Containers
Dogs
Dogs - psychology
Domestic animals
Feeding Behavior
Female
Food
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
General aspects
Gestures
Humans
Life Sciences
Male
Mammalia
Original Paper
Psychology Research
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Reward
Vertebrates: general zoology, morphology, phylogeny, systematics, cytogenetics, geographical distribution
Zoology
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Summary:Dogs are strongly influenced by human behavior, and they readily form bonds with specific humans. Yet these lines of inquiry are not often combined. The goal of this study was to investigate whether such bonds would play a role in how dogs behave in response to human signals. Using various types of signals, we compared dogs’ use of information from a familiar human (their owner) versus an unfamiliar human when choosing between two food containers. In some conditions, the owner indicated a container that gave food and a stranger indicated a container that did not; in other conditions, this was reversed. Dogs more often chose the container indicated by or nearest to their owner, even when this container never yielded a food reward. In two conditions, dogs chose at chance: a control condition in which both pointers were strangers and a condition in which the owner and stranger sat reading books and provided no social signal. This is the first study to directly compare owners to strangers in a single food-choice situation. Our results suggest that dogs make decisions by attending preferentially to social signals from humans with whom they have become familiar.
ISSN:1435-9448
1435-9456
DOI:10.1007/s10071-013-0677-0