Social learning from humans or conspecifics: differences and similarities between wolves and dogs
Most domestication hypotheses propose that dogs have been selected for enhanced communication and interactions with humans, including learning socially from human demonstrators. However, to what extent these skills are newly derived and to what extent they originate from wolf–wolf interactions is un...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Frontiers Media S.A.
2013
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3849518/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24363648 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00868 |
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author | Range, Friederike Virányi, Zsófia |
author_facet | Range, Friederike Virányi, Zsófia |
author_sort | Range, Friederike |
collection | PubMed |
description | Most domestication hypotheses propose that dogs have been selected for enhanced communication and interactions with humans, including learning socially from human demonstrators. However, to what extent these skills are newly derived and to what extent they originate from wolf–wolf interactions is unclear. In order to test for the possible origins of dog social cognition, we need to compare the interactions of wolves and dogs with humans and with conspecifics. Here, we tested identically raised and kept juvenile wolves and dogs in a social learning task with human and conspecific demonstrators. Using a local enhancement task, we found that both wolves and dogs benefitted from a demonstration independent of the demonstrator species in comparison to a control, no demonstration condition. Interestingly, if the demonstrator only pretended to hide food at the target location, wolves and dogs reacted differently: while dogs differentiated between this without-food and with-food demonstration independent of the demonstrator species, wolves only did so in case of human demonstrators. We attribute this finding to wolves being more attentive toward behavioral details of the conspecific models than the dogs: although the demonstrator dogs were trained to execute the demonstration, they disliked the food reward, which might have decreased the interest of the wolves in finding the food reward. Overall, these results suggest that dogs but also wolves can use information provided by both human and conspecific demonstrators in a local enhancement task. Therefore we suggest that a more fine-scale analysis of dog and wolf social learning is needed to determine the effects of domestication. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-3849518 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2013 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-38495182013-12-20 Social learning from humans or conspecifics: differences and similarities between wolves and dogs Range, Friederike Virányi, Zsófia Front Psychol Psychology Most domestication hypotheses propose that dogs have been selected for enhanced communication and interactions with humans, including learning socially from human demonstrators. However, to what extent these skills are newly derived and to what extent they originate from wolf–wolf interactions is unclear. In order to test for the possible origins of dog social cognition, we need to compare the interactions of wolves and dogs with humans and with conspecifics. Here, we tested identically raised and kept juvenile wolves and dogs in a social learning task with human and conspecific demonstrators. Using a local enhancement task, we found that both wolves and dogs benefitted from a demonstration independent of the demonstrator species in comparison to a control, no demonstration condition. Interestingly, if the demonstrator only pretended to hide food at the target location, wolves and dogs reacted differently: while dogs differentiated between this without-food and with-food demonstration independent of the demonstrator species, wolves only did so in case of human demonstrators. We attribute this finding to wolves being more attentive toward behavioral details of the conspecific models than the dogs: although the demonstrator dogs were trained to execute the demonstration, they disliked the food reward, which might have decreased the interest of the wolves in finding the food reward. Overall, these results suggest that dogs but also wolves can use information provided by both human and conspecific demonstrators in a local enhancement task. Therefore we suggest that a more fine-scale analysis of dog and wolf social learning is needed to determine the effects of domestication. Frontiers Media S.A. 2013-12-03 /pmc/articles/PMC3849518/ /pubmed/24363648 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00868 Text en Copyright © 2013 Range and Virányi. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Psychology Range, Friederike Virányi, Zsófia Social learning from humans or conspecifics: differences and similarities between wolves and dogs |
title | Social learning from humans or conspecifics: differences and similarities between wolves and dogs |
title_full | Social learning from humans or conspecifics: differences and similarities between wolves and dogs |
title_fullStr | Social learning from humans or conspecifics: differences and similarities between wolves and dogs |
title_full_unstemmed | Social learning from humans or conspecifics: differences and similarities between wolves and dogs |
title_short | Social learning from humans or conspecifics: differences and similarities between wolves and dogs |
title_sort | social learning from humans or conspecifics: differences and similarities between wolves and dogs |
topic | Psychology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3849518/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24363648 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00868 |
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