A szociális kontextus hatása a tanulási folyamatra kutyán

Many animal species, which are to some extent adapted to social life, have the ability to learn and gain new information about their environment by observing the behaviour of the other. In the case of social learning the observer’s behaviour becomes similar to the behaviour of the demonstrator. Social learning occurs if the to-be-learnt behaviour is flexible and shows variations within the species. Social learning is facilitated by the specific relationship between the two individuals, including knowing well each other. Social learning is manifested by diverse mechanisms including stimulus/local enhancement, observational learning and imitation

A kutyák szociális nézési viselkedése az oxitocin hatására

Family dogs spend most of their life together with their owners. For the successful cooperation between dog and human it is crucial that they understand each other’s communication signals. According to the domestication hypothesis the humans had a preference for those ancestors of dogs who showed a stronger tendency to understand human communication signals. The evolutionary changes in the dogs behaviour make possible a close attachment between the human and the dog, and by enhancing the communicative interaction, this provides the basis for an effective cooperation

The Way Dogs (Canis familiaris) Look at Human Emotional Faces Is Modulated by Oxytocin. An Eye-Tracking Study

Dogs have been shown to excel in reading human social cues, including facial cues. In the present study we used eye-tracking technology to further study dogs’ face processing abilities. It was found that dogs discriminated between human facial regions in their spontaneous viewing pattern and looked most to the eye region independently of facial expression. Furthermore dogs played most attention to the first two images presented, afterwards their attention dramatically decreases; a finding that has methodological implications. Increasing evidence indicates that the oxytocin system is involved in dogs’ human-directed social competence, thus as a next step we investigated the effects of oxytocin on processing of human facial emotions. It was found that oxytocin decreases dogs’ looking to the human faces expressing angry emotional expression. More interestingly, however, after oxytocin pre-treatment dogs’ preferential gaze toward the eye region when processing happy human facial expressions disappears. These results provide the first evidence that oxytocin is involved in the regulation of human face processing in dogs. The present study is one of the few empirical investigations that explore eye gaze patterns in naïve and untrained pet dogs using a non-invasive eye-tracking technique and thus offers unique but largely untapped method for studying social cognition in dogs