Do Dogs Prefer Helpers in an Infant-Based Social Evaluation Task?

Social evaluative abilities emerge in human infancy, highlighting their importance in shaping our species' early understanding of the social world. Remarkably, infants show social evaluation in relatively abstract contexts: for instance, preferring a wooden shape that helps another shape in a puppet show over a shape that hinders another character (Hamlin et al., 2007). Here we ask whether these abstract social evaluative abilities are shared with other species. Domestic dogs provide an ideal animal species in which to address this question because this species cooperates extensively with conspecifics and humans and may thus benefit from a more general ability to socially evaluate prospective partners. We tested dogs on a social evaluation puppet show task originally used with human infants. Subjects watched a helpful shape aid an agent in achieving its goal and a hinderer shape prevent an agent from achieving its goal. We examined (1) whether dogs showed a preference for the helpful or hinderer shape, (2) whether dogs exhibited longer exploration of the helpful or hinderer shape, and (3) whether dogs were more likely to engage with their handlers during the helper or hinderer events. In contrast to human infants, dogs showed no preference for either the helper or the hinderer, nor were they more likely to engage with their handlers during helper or hinderer events. Dogs did spend more time exploring the hindering shape, perhaps indicating that they were puzzled by the agent's unhelpful behavior. However, this preference was moderated by a preference for one of the two shapes, regardless of role. These findings suggest that, relative to infants, dogs show weak or absent social evaluative abilities when presented with abstract events and point to constraints on dogs' abilities to evaluate others' behavior

Gaze in cats and dogs

Domestic dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) developed many behaviors across domestication, one example being gaze behavior. Gaze is the crux of other behaviors that make dogs unique in human-animal dyads, including lookbacks, gaze-following, and participation in an oxytocin feedback loop. Gaze behavior may have been motivated and sustained by evergreen cooperative relationships between dogs and humans (e.g., hunting, service roles). One way to confirm this relationship is to compare dogs to a domesticated species that lacks a protracted history of companionship: the domestic cat (Felis catus). In this study, we compare the gaze duration to owners of cats and dogs in a community-science setting. Due to the different historical relationship with humans, cats may have different gaze behavior than dogs. We replicated previous gaze studies with in-lab dogs and wolves (Nagasawa et al., 2015), and dingoes (Johnston et al., 2017), requesting owners to sit with their pet for 5 minutes and interact as they normally would. Cats and dogs gazed at their owners for similar durations, but owners spent much less time petting and in contact with their cats. There were no significant correlations between secondary variables (vocalizations, petting, and physical contact) and gaze. Dogs gazed less in our community science setting than dogs tested previously in-lab. Future research can include feral cats or wild cat species to shed light on gaze behavior development in the genus, while more community science work can identify the behaviors that dogs shift in familiar and unfamiliar environments

Punishment is sensitive to outside options in humans but not cleaner fish (Labroides dimidiatus)

Across human and animal societies, punishment is used as a means of responding to cheating and modifying the behavior of others. A growing body of work shows that human punishment decisions involve representing both the outcomes of transgressions, as well as whether a transgressor chose to do wrong. An important question in comparative cognition is whether nonhuman animals demonstrate a similar sensitivity to choice when punishing. Understanding whether and to what extent animals integrate information about choice into their punishment decisions can shed light on the selective pressures and cognitive mechanisms that shape human punishment. Here we explore this question by comparing punishment in cooperative pairs of reef-dwelling cleaner wrasses (Labroides dimidiatus) and humans (Homo sapiens). In Study 1, we investigate whether punishment in adult male cleaners is influenced by whether females had a choice to cheat. In Study 2, we ask the same question of human adults, using a novel task inspired by the cooperative interactions between pairs of cleaners and their client fish. Our results support previous work finding that punishment of cheating in humans is sensitive to whether transgressors chose to cheat: they punished more when the outside option was cooperation. However, we did not find a similar sensitivity to outside options in cleaners. Our results provide a direct comparison of the role of outside options in punishment decisions in humans and a distantly-related cooperative species. We suggest that important cognitive constraints may be in place that limit cleaners’ ability to simultaneously represent both the choice a transgressor made as well as the choices they could have made

ManyDogs 1: A multi-lab replication study of dogs' pointing comprehension

To promote collaboration across canine science, address replicability issues, and advance open science practices within animal cognition, we have launched the ManyDogs consortium, modeled on similar ManyX projects in other fields. We aimed to create a collaborative network that (a) uses large, diverse samples to investigate and replicate findings, (b) promotes open science practices of pre-registering hypotheses, methods, and analysis plans, (c) investigates the influence of differences across populations and breeds, and (d) examines how different research methods and testing environments influence the robustness of results. Our first study combines a phenomenon that appears to be highly reliable—dogs’ ability to follow human pointing—with a question that remains controversial: do dogs interpret pointing as a social communicative gesture or as a simple associative cue? We collected data (N = 455) from 20 research sites on two conditions of a 2-alternative object choice task: (1) Ostensive (pointing to a baited cup after making eye-contact and saying the dog’s name); (2) Non-ostensive (pointing without eye-contact, after a throat-clearing auditory control cue). Comparing performance between conditions, while both were significantly above chance, there was no significant difference in dogs’ responses. This result was consistent across sites. Further, we found that dogs followed contralateral, momentary pointing at lower rates than has been reported in prior research, suggesting that there are limits to the robustness of point-following behavior: not all pointing styles are equally likely to elicit a response. Together, these findings underscore the important role of procedural details in study design and the broader need for replication studies in canine science