What do dogs think of humans

While in this paper we will restrict our discussion of ethical implications to the kinds of studies available, other, more profound ethical implications might lie ahead, once cognition research broadens its focus. In this section, we will investigate the characteristics of the human—dog relationship by following the decisive question of how dogs adapt to the human environment. We will turn our attention to the latest research results from the fields of animal cognition and behavior.

The latter ones have emerged from domestication and individual social and cognitive development Huber, Both kinds of developmental factors have contributed to the success of dogs living among and with humans, including their adoption of the numerous roles humans give to them. For thousands of years humans have changed the morphology, physiology, and behavior of dogs through selective breeding.

Canines were the earliest domesticated animal, a process that started somewhere between 15, and 30, years ago, most likely when gray wolves began scavenging around human settlements. Dog experts differ on how active role humans played in the next step, but eventually the relationship became a mutual one, as we began employing dogs for hunting, guarding, and companionship.

It is, however, still an open question to what extent the three kinds of cognitive and communicative adaptations — of the wolf, the dog, and the human companion pet — contribute to this extraordinary achievement. It is furthermore disputable if the outcome of these different developments is a new skill or rather a special sensitivity. In addition, we may distinguish not only between phylogenetic and ontogenetic routes, but also between construction and inflection Heyes, , to overcome the simplistic dichotomy of nature vs.

One cautionary application of the multiple routes framework would be to assume that dogs have acquired a special sensitivity towards human gestures, speech, and behavior as a phylogenetic inflection through human selection over many thousands of years. This sensitivity is not a new cognitive or sensory mechanism, but the result of a selection biasing the input.

Since the time dogs became a special focus of ethology and comparative cognition research, the so-called Domestication Hypothesis has dominated the debate about the special skills of dogs Hare et al. It has been assumed that dogs have been selected to cooperate and communicate with humans during domestication and, thus, evolved some genetic predispositions allowing them to develop skills shared with humans.

Accordingly, it has been suggested that, in a unique way, domestication has equipped dogs with two abilities necessary for cooperative problem solving — namely social tolerance and social attentiveness, which enable them to adjust their behavior to that of their human partners Ostojic and Clayton, Empirical support for the Domestication Hypothesis has been sought by comparing dogs and wolves.

Several of the early comparisons have indeed found profound differences between domesticated forms and their wild ancestors i. It has been proposed that dogs have been selected for tamer temperament and for reduced fear and aggression, which allows a potential partner to come close even around food, which in turn explains the higher success of dogs in cooperative and communicative interactions with humans in comparison to wolves Hare and Tomasello, Apart from social tolerance, cooperation with humans and learning from humans are facilitated by a high degree of social attentiveness.

Attentiveness towards potential partners varies not only according to the tasks, but at least in the human—dog case, it crucially depends on the relationship between the partners Range et al. Dogs have proven successful in several tasks that are thought to require high attention towards humans, such as experiments on social learning Kubinyi et al. Another line of evidence for the differences between dogs and wolves comes from pointing studies.

Rather than tolerance, domestication may have led to reduced fear of humans, which is supported by the fact that dogs need less intensive socialization than wolves to avoid fear of humans Scott and Fuller, ; Klinghammer and Goodmann, If dogs are less fearful of humans and more comfortable around them than wolves, they would have gained advantages from witnessing human actions even without being more attentive , and from sooner engaging in interactions with humans.

According to the Canine Cooperation Hypothesis, the high social attentiveness, tolerance, and presumable cooperativeness of wolves provided a good basis for dog—human cooperation to evolve during domestication. In addition, some relevant features in sociability and cooperativeness are shared by wolves and humans and thus have probably facilitated the domestication of dogs Clutton-Brock, ; Schleidt, However, dogs are not only specifically sensitive to humans because of the domestication history of their species and the evolutionary baggage that has been passed down to them from their wild ancestors, the wolves.

They are also what they are because each of them trains their outstanding sensitivity towards humans on an individual, ontogenetic level. Despite being equipped by evolution with skills and propensities to adapt to humans by showing high levels of social tolerance and attentiveness, dogs need to individually learn much about their heterospecific partners in order to establish and maintain firm individualized relationships.

During their life in the human household as pets or companions, they have ample opportunities to do so. Family dogs live in close day-to-day contact with humans and can therefore collect an enormous amount of experience.

Research from the last decades has sought to understand how dogs perceive elements of their environment, learn about it, and use this knowledge to make informed decisions about proper behavior Huber, Their skills in face processing, behavior reading, observational learning, and perspective taking play a crucial role here for reviews, see Bensky et al. By monitoring human faces, dogs seem to obtain important social information, ranging from communicative gestures to attentive states Schwab and Huber, ; Kaminski and Nitzschner, Dogs can quickly find out what features are relevant or informative for making important decisions.

They also spontaneously focus on the eyes to infer where humans attend, what they are interested in, and even what they intend to do next see eye movement studies like for example Somppi et al. Gaze following is present in many species, but dogs outperform even nonhuman primates in following human gaze in object choice tasks Hare et al. In one study, dogs were tempted with sausages but told by the caregiver not to take them.

When being watched by the caregiver, dogs stayed lying down most often or for the longest time, but when the caregiver read a book, watched TV, turned her back on them, or left the room, their patience ceased. Obviously, they were using eye contact and eye orientation as cues. Human faces provide much more information than simply looking patterns.

A great number of idiosyncratic features allow humans to identify and recognize others. Would dogs also profit from this rich source of information? Could they also identify and recognize their caregiver and other familiar humans? In one study we put these questions to test and asked dogs to discriminate between their caregiver and another highly familiar person by active choice approaching and touching; Huber et al.

The task could not simply be solved on the basis of familiarity approaching the familiar person , which is considered an easier task Wilkinson et al. Dogs could do so, even when they saw only the real face of the humans, but had difficulties when the face was only projected as a picture to a big screen. Only a minority of dogs could finally identify the caregiver on face pictures in which the outer parts of their faces were occluded with a balaclava hood.

A further study confirmed the importance of human eyes for dogs, because they rely less on the nose or the mouth than on the eyes for human face discrimination Pitteri et al.

They also prefer looking at upright over inverted faces, exactly as we ourselves do Somppi et al. On the basis of our findings that dogs are competent enough to extract subtle, idiosyncratic features of a face in order to identify a human person, despite changes of color, hair style, make-up, jewelry, hats, etc. It has been already shown that dogs can rely on human facial expressions when making decisions about approaching other objects Merola et al.

However, a study in which the stimuli were photographs showing human faces with two different emotional expressions did not yield conclusive results Nagasawa et al.

Although dogs learned to discriminate between happy smiling faces and neutral faces of their caregiver and subsequently transferred the contingency to novel faces of unfamiliar people, it is not clear whether the dogs simply used a salient discriminatory cue, such as the visibility of teeth in the happy faces, to solve both the discrimination and the generalization task.

Indeed, the dogs did not only manage to learn the training task, but they were also able to transfer the extracted rule to novel faces, even if they had been presented a hemiface not shown in training. These findings provide strong evidence that dogs are able to discriminate between emotional expressions in a different species, which, compared to emotion recognition in conspecifics, is particularly challenging cf.

Parr et al. For instance, humans open their mouth and show their teeth while laughing, whereas dogs express the underlying emotions of aggression by showing their teeth. Therefore, dogs cannot rely on genetic predispositions, but need to individually learn the emotional expressions of humans. The fact that dogs could spontaneously generalize from one face half to the other without the possibility to use cues learned during training strongly supports the idea that they remembered something from their daily experiences with their caregiver or other familiar people and then used this information in the artificial laboratory environment.

As they had not been explicitly trained, it seems that they had acquired the competence by latent learning. Humans express their emotions not only visually but also their voices convey information about affects. Dogs may exploit these contingencies by extracting and integrating bimodal sensory emotional information from humans.

From the combination of visual and auditory cues they may form multimodal representations. This result points to the possibility that dogs recognized or understood the emotional content of the human faces, not just discriminated them perceptually.

Recent eye-tracking studies have supported this hypothesis Barber et al. The ability of dogs to integrate information of humans across modalities has also been investigated by using the expectancy-violation procedure Adachi et al.

The vocalization used was from the same person or another person, thus matched or mismatched the image. According to the expectancy-violation logic, dogs should be surprised if the visual and auditory cues mismatch and thus look longer than when the two cues match. This is what happened. Taken together, there is cumulating evidence that dogs obtain social information from their experiences with humans, specifically from their facial expressions.

They can recognize and remember individual humans. They understand to a significant degree what these humans attend to, what they are interested in, and what they intend to do next.

They can discriminate, individually learn from, and categorize emotional expressions, and they integrate information coming from vocalizations into their understanding of humans and their emotions. Thus, they form multi-modal representations of humans and their emotions, integrating emotions, facial expressions, and vocalizations.

A prominent example of how well dogs understand humans and how eager they are to cooperate is the behavior of assistance dogs, especially for leading blind people Naderi et al. In the latter case, information is not only provided but also accepted by both parties in the course of their joint actions.

So what exactly do dogs learn about our behavior, especially about human actions that are unlikely in their species-specific action repertoire?

An especially interesting group of actions are those that serve us humans to inform the dog or to guide them. Numerous studies have shown that dogs can reliably follow a set of basic human cues e. Among those actions, perhaps the best studied one is the human pointing gesture. First of all, pointing by humans is a social cue, which in general is more salient or effective than non- social cues like visual markers in terms of signaling the location of something important, like food Agnetta et al.

In sharp contrast to apes Herrmann and Tomasello, , this ability to use human cues by dogs is more effective in cooperative contexts Wobber and Hare, than in competitive ones Pettersson et al. Although so far there is no consensus among researchers about when exactly dogs become competent at understanding the pointing gesture e. Still, positive feedback processes both evolutionary and epigenetic have increased the readiness of dogs to attend to humans, providing the basis for dog-human communication.

Among dogs, breeds that have been historically bred for working purposes respond to human pointing cues significantly more than breeds that have been bred for companionship Wobber and Kaminski, , and breeds that were originally bred for cooperative work e. Furthermore, those with a special training for responding to cues from a distance, like working-gun dogs, utilized a pointing cue significantly more than dogs without such training McKinley and Sambrook, Independent of breed differences, shelter dogs are less successful than pet dogs at following a distal momentary-pointing gesture Udell et al.

All of this does not mean that breed differences to the extent they exist are either phylogenetic or ontogenetic — they are most likely both. We should keep this in mind in order to avoid the nature—nurture fallacy. It may come as a surprise that it is still not clear whether dogs understand the communicative intent of the signaling human or whether they react only to some cuing that directs their attention to the reward.

Earlier work showed that dogs are able to rely on relatively novel gestural forms of the human communicative pointing gesture and that they are able to comprehend to some extent the referential nature of human pointing Soproni et al.

However, recent advances in this research indicate that dogs do not necessarily interpret pointing informatively, that is, as simply providing information, but rather as a command, ordering them to move to a particular location. Both findings suggest that dogs do not see pointing as an imperative command but as an informative or referential cue.

Still, ongoing research is looking into the question of whether dogs react to human pointing gestures in acts of joint communication and shared information. Indeed, nothing more would be needed to use dogs during certain activities like hunting and herding.

Still, the area between a completely mechanistic and a completely mentalistic account is huge. At the middle ground we may see dogs being sensitive to humans having visual perspectives that are different from their own.

But is this sensitivity simply a result of associatively learning to respond to direct cues e. The results of two recent studies indicate the second possibility.

In a food-stealing task dogs seem to understand that, when the food and therefore the area around it is illuminated, the human can see them and, therefore, they refrain from approaching and stealing the food Kaminski et al. Very recently we replicated the second study, but added a condition in which no directly observable cues could tell the dogs who would be the knower and thus reliable informant Catala et al. The critical control for behavior-reading, as the less demanding alternative to mind-reading, involved two informants that showed identical looking behavior during the food hiding event.

However, due to their different position in the room, only one had the opportunity to see where the food was hidden by a third person. Using geometrical gaze following, dogs could infer who could possibly see the food hiding, and whom to trust. By choosing the help of the knower but ignoring the help of the guesser dogs showed perspective taking. We still have to be careful and avoid over-interpretation.

Geometrical gaze following, despite being seen to rest on a cognitively sophisticated mechanism Fitch et al. Still, even this does mean something: dogs seem to observe humans closely, form behavioral rules from this and apply them to new contexts.

The reluctance of dogs to follow the looking-away person could have been learned in similar, but not identical, situations during their life in the human vicinity. In numerous cases they have seen what consequences human looking behavior has, that it is easier to communicate with humans whose eyes are visible and who look at instead of away from a target, and that they ignore things they have not seen before. This means, on the other hand, that in order to deal with humans, dogs need opportunities to be with them, observe them, and learn from situations.

Taken together, these findings show us that dogs are sensitive to human gestures, can learn their meaning, and seem eager to cooperate. They understand gestures as imperative commands but also to some extent as informative or referential cues, engaging with humans as communicative partners. Thereby, they do not necessarily subordinate their own perspective to the human one: they take their own well-informed knowledge into account when given ill-informed commands.

Especially dog breeds that have been bred for cooperative work are very good at understanding human gestures and commands. On the other hand, individual training opportunities seem important: shelter dogs for example are less successful than pet dogs at following human pointing gestures. Dogs have been found to be excellent behavior-readers if given the opportunity. They are highly competent in learning about directly observable but also quite subtle behavioral, gestural, vocal, and attentional cues, which is of high adaptive value for life in the human environment.

In addition to their behavior-reading competences they also seem to be sensitive to some mental states in humans.

They for example seem to know that humans have visual perspectives different from their own. Dogs have impressive capacities for social learning. This competence shines through in almost all forms of social learning, including local enhancement e. They not only benefit from having the opportunity to learn from humans, they actually learn something relevant. This implies that their learning is not only shaped by goal-directedness but influenced by other factors as well.

This even applies to strategies that are seemingly unproductive or dysfunctional but nevertheless used by someone they observe. This peculiar form of copying was until that time considered a uniquely human capacity, which likely played a key role in why human culture can accumulate over time Clay and Tennie, It had been assumed that humans overimitate not only for cognitive and normative reasons, but also to satisfy social motivations.

If dogs show this behavior as well, it could highlight how deep they are enculturated in our human world because their readiness to overimitate could highlight their affiliation with closely bonded humans as a motivation for behavior.

A first study with canines provided suggestive evidence for overimitation Johnston et al. In the test, the experimenter first established a positive relationship with the subjects by feeding them and then demonstrated how to open a puzzle box, but also performed a causally irrelevant action onto the box moving a non-functional lever.

Surprisingly, half of all tested dogs and dingoes copied both actions, although in further tests some stopped replicating the irrelevant action. In two studies in the Clever Dog Lab in Vienna, the two actions had been separated both spatially and temporarily in order to ensure that the dogs did not confuse their causal natures Huber et al. The causal action consisted of opening a sliding door that blocked the access to a treat; the irrelevant action involved touching colored dots that were mounted on the wall at a distance.

Touching the paper sheet had no effect and was not necessary for getting the treat. Despite its irrelevance, almost half of the dogs replicated the touching action Huber et al.

Chimpanzees, for instance, were found to act in a purely goal-directed, efficient manner Horner and Whiten, This led Huber et al. Not only their ability to cooperate with, but also to learn from, humans seems to be closely related to their affiliative e. Dogs seem to interpret a test situation as a form of communication or social game Soproni et al.

And, like children, they attend more to those humans with whom they also had a close relationship Horn et al. In a follow-up study, we tested the hypothesis that dogs are more inclined to copy irrelevant actions if shown by the affiliated caregiver rather than by an unfamiliar person. By faithfully replicating Huber et al. This finding thus confirmed our hypothesis that overimitation is facilitated by the affiliative relationship between the human demonstrator and the imitating dog, satisfying social motivations.

Family dogs may repeat the actions of the human partner either because they want to please their caregiver or because they are inclined to obey by following tacit commands. While the first is clearly a positive characteristic of the dog—human relationship, the second one is ambiguous, although the two are linked. However, it is also possible — although difficult to prove — that the dogs overimitate because they want to be part of our social game, meaning that they want to be included in the social interaction that is happening.

This explanation is compatible with the existence of an urge to please the caregiver or an inclination to obey. The intention to preserve and foster the bond between human and dog, however, may be in itself a motivation behind this behavior. A dog might furthermore trust her caregiver in such a profound way that she sticks to whatever the caregiver proposes, at least for a while.

In a team that is usually built on trust and affiliation this makes sense as a social strategy. It is surely difficult to test for such explanations based on trust or affiliation, but that should not be a reason to rule them out right from the beginning. Complex social motivations in animals are clearly getting increased attention from empirical research lately.

Disentangling the affiliative bonds between dogs and their caregivers, their scope and meaning, is one of the big challenges we face. For instance, dogs pay more attention to the actions of their caregivers than to the actions of other familiar humans Horn et al. And again, like in the case of the human parent—infant bond, the quality of the bond has strong influences on all these changes just mentioned Myers, ; Ainsworth, Taken together, these findings show that dogs pay close attention, not only to the emotions and gestures of humans, but also to their actions.

They even overimitate, thus showing a specific copying style that is believed to be a crucial feature of cumulative human culture. Overimitation in dogs is another strong sign for how deeply they attend to humans, especially to those with whom they have close relationships.

This can be nicely seen in family dogs interacting with their caregivers. Why dogs attend so closely to the behavior of their caregivers can be explained by different reasons: they surely want to please them and are inclined to obey them.

However, they might also understand themselves as partners in our social interactions and are part in our social game. Bonding and affiliation are to be understood as motivations for social interaction. Yes, he gobbled them up quickly, but that could have meant anything. Maybe he was hungry or he was simply trying to not hurt your feelings.

Or, maybe he loves the treats and is waiting patiently for you to make more. The truth is: there's no concrete way to know for sure about these minute-to-minute thoughts. It's up to you to decipher his cues and imagine his detailed thoughts.

He is your best friend, after all! Have you ever wondered, "What do dogs think about? It's up to you and your imagination to dream up the details! Erin Ollila believes in the power of words and how a message can inform—and even transform—its intended audience.

Her writing can be found all over the internet and in print, and includes interviews, ghostwriting, blog posts, and creative nonfiction. Erin is a geek for SEO and all things social media. She graduated from Fairfield University with an M.

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Not so much. In true, loveable doggie fashion, dogs simply exist in the present moment. If you give your doggo plenty of love and playtime, your dog will see you as an awesome, loveable being.

Dogs are way smarter that we often give them credit for. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. So do dogs think humans are dogs? You may also like. September 1, Dogs come to understand the world, and each other, in the same manner as human children are introduced to the world, through visual cues and scent clues.

Unlike humans, whose main form of communication and comprehension is vocal, dogs rely predominantly on scent, followed by sight, then sound, and finally the use of their voice.

As an example, a dog will learn a hand gesture — a visual cue — far quicker than a verbal command. In fact, once they understand the visual cue, it is the association of the sound with that hand gesture that teaches them what the words mean.

While there are similarities in the way humans and dogs think, there are also great differences.