Effects of selection for cooperation and attention in dogs

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On the utilisation of social animals as a model for social robotics

Social robotics is becoming a driving field in building artificial agents. The possibility to construct agents that can engage in meaningful social interaction with humans presents new challenges for the engineers. In general social robotics has been inspired dominantly by human psychology and aimed for building human-like robots. Only a small subcategory of companion robots (also referred to as robotic pets) was build to mimic animals. In the opinion essay we argue that all social robots should be seen as companions and more conceptual emphasis should be put on the inter-specific interaction between humans and social robots. This view is underlined by the means of an ethological analysis, and critical evaluation of present day companion robots. We suggest that human-animal interaction provides a rich source of knowledge for designing social robots that are able to interact with humans under a wide range of conditions

Current Trends in Canine Problem-Solving and Cognition

Dogs have occupied a central place in modern comparative cognition, partly because of their specific past and present relationship with humans. Over the years, we have gained insights about the functioning of the dog’s mind, which has helped us to understand how dogs’ problem-solving abilities differ from those present in related species such as the wolf. Novel methodologies are also emerging that allow for the study of neural and genetic mechanisms that control mental functions. By providing an overview from an ethological perspective, we call for greater integration of the field and a better understanding of natural dog behavior as a way to generate scientific hypotheses

Selection for specific behavioural traits does not influence preference of chasing motion and visual strategy in dogs

Perception of inanimate objects as animate based on motion cues alone seems to be present in phylogenetically distant species, from birth (humans and chicks). However, we do not know whether the species’ social and ecological environment has an influence on this phenomenon. Dogs serve as a unique species to investigate whether selection for specific behavioural traits influences animacy perception. We tested purebred companion dogs, and assigned them into two groups based on the type of work they were originally selected for: (1) Chasers, tracking and chasing prey; (2) Retrievers, mark and remember downed game. We displayed isosceles triangles presenting a chasing pattern vs moving independently, in parallel on a screen. We hypothesised that Chasers prefer to look at chasing and Retrievers eventually focus their visual attention on the independent motion. Overall, we did not find a significant difference between groups regarding the looking duration of dogs or the frequency of their gaze alternation between the chasing and independent motions. Thus it seems that selection for specific traits does not influence the perception of animate entities within the species

Potential application of autonomous and semi-autonomous robots in the study of animal behaviour

In this review we aim to facilitate closer contact between animal behaviour and robotics. In recent years cognitive psychology and cognitive ethology became interested in the mental mechanisms controlling the animal mind. However, this theoretical interest is hampered by several methodological problems. Interactive robots can offer a novel way to investigate cognitive skills in animals. It may be useful to construct robots that are specifically designed to interact with animals

After 150 years of watching: is there a need for synthetic ethology?

The Darwinian idea of mental continuity is about 150 years old. Although nobody has strongly denied this evolutionary link, both conceptually and practically, relative slow advance has been made by ethology and comparative psychology to quantify mental evolution. Debates on the mechanistic interpretation of cognition often struggle with the same old issues (e.g., associationism vs cognitivism), and in general, experimental methods have made also relative slow progress since the introduction of the puzzle box. In this paper, we illustrate the prevailing issues using examples on ‘mental state attribution’ and ‘perspective taking” and argue that the situation could be improved by the introduction of novel methodological inventions and insights. We suggest that focusing on problem-solving skills and constructing artificial agents that aim to correspond and interact with biological ones, may help to understand the functioning of the mind. We urge the establishment of a novel approach, synthetic ethology, in which researchers take on a practical stance and construct artificial embodied minds relying of specific computational architectures the performance of which can be compared directly to biological agents

Displaying jealous behavior versus experiencing jealousy

Jealous behavior is the manifestation of complex behavioral interactions initiated by an individual who aims to maintain an important social relationship that is threatened by a rival. Researchers prefer to focus on the emotion thought to control this behavior, “jealousy,” before understanding the mechanisms of the behavior. Researchers conducting recent behavioral studies on jealous behavior in dogs are still struggling to find strong experimental evidence. Thus, the positive correlation between amygdala activation and reported aggression in dogs described in Cook et al.’s target article is far from constituting evidence for “jealousy” in dogs

The effect of the owner’ s personality on the behaviour of owner-dog dyads

We describe the relationships between dog owners’ personality attributes (assessed via questionnaire), their behaviours and the dog’s behaviours observed during brief dog-owner and dog-stranger interactions (N = 78). Interactions comprised the owner commanding the dog to sit, and the stranger showing a ball to the restrained dog and then hiding it. Owners scoring higher on neuroticism and openness used more commands (gestural and verbal) when asking the dog to sit, and the dogs of owners higher on neuroticism obeyed with a longer latency and spent more time looking at the stranger. More extraverted owners praised their dog more, and it took longer for their dogs to look at the stranger but they spent more time looking at the stranger, whereas dogs of more agreeable owners spent more time looking at the ball. Based on these results we conclude that some aspects of owners’ personality appear to be tied to their dog’s attentional concerns

What are you or who are you? The emergence of social interaction between dog and Unidentified Moving Object (UMO)

Robots offer new possibilities for investigating animal social behaviour. This method enhances controllability and reproducibility of experimental techniques, and it allows also the experimental separation of the effects of bodily appearance (embodiment) and behaviour. In the present study we examined dogs’ interactive behaviour in a problem solving task (in which the dog has no access to the food) with three different social partners, two of which were robots and the third a human behaving in a robot-like manner. The Mechanical UMO (Unidentified Moving Object) and the Mechanical Human differed only in their embodiment, but showed similar behaviour toward the dog. In contrast, the Social UMO was interactive, showed contingent responsiveness and goal-directed behaviour and moved along varied routes. The dogs showed shorter looking and touching duration, but increased gaze alternation toward the Mechanical Human than to the Mechanical UMO. This suggests that dogs’ interactive behaviour may have been affected by previous experience with typical humans. We found that dogs also looked longer and showed more gaze alternations between the food and the Social UMO compared to the Mechanical UMO. These results suggest that dogs form expectations about an unfamiliar moving object within a short period of time and they recognise some social aspects of UMOs’ behaviour. This is the first evidence that interactive behaviour of a robot is important for evoking dogs’ social responsiveness