Dog Cognition

Question 1

How do people often interpret dog behaviour?

Answer 1

Anthropomorphise - interpret higher cognitive states than are necessary

Question 2

How can most cognition be explained?

Answer 2

Reinforcing properties of the consequences of the behaviours action upon the environment
- No need to use mental state as an intervening variable
Species specific responses or rule of thumb, trial and error learning, observational learning, prior experience

Question 3

What is most research of cognition based around?

Answer 3

Ruling out simpler explanations in order to prove higher level processing

Question 4

Which species are the majority of cognition studies carried out in?

Answer 4

Primates

Question 5

Why is social cognition likely to have evolved?

Answer 5

For social animals the social environment is more complex than the physical, and there is an adaptive advantage to predicting others behaviour -> evolution of mental processing abilities

Question 6

Which animals other than primates have social cognition studies looked at?

Answer 6

pigs, chickens dogs

Question 7

Why were dogs not looked at until recently?

Answer 7

Deemed to be “too evolved”

Question 8

How does understanding cognition have implications for animal welfare?

Answer 8

Numerical competence and time keeping - telling days of the week?
Perception of others point of view and suffering - eg. slaughter

Question 9

What forms of numerical competence are possible?

Answer 9

Relative numerousness
Mental representation of number
Counting

Question 10

Give an example of a study on numerical competence in dogs

Answer 10

West and Young 2002 - Expectancy violation
Biscuits placed behind a screen, gaze duration measured to be longer when too few or too many biscuits were revealed at the end (taken as “surprise” that situation differed form their expectations)
Expectancy violation also looked at in rhesus monkeys (Tinkelpaugh 1928, poorly documented) and Hauser 2000

Question 11

What are the interpretations of numerical competence in dogs?

Answer 11

Arithmetic
Object permenance - seen before, change noticed
Delayed matching to sample
- Dogs never saw biscuits in ultimate position so must have at least some concept of numbers
- have shown quantity discrimination (Ward and Smutts 2007)
- choice is affected by owners choice (Prato-Previde et al 2008)

Question 12

Why would numerical competence be adaptive?

Answer 12

Counting predators/food sources etc.

Question 13

Outline a paradigm for investigating visual perspective taking in children - how is this adapted for animals?

Answer 13

Two children in room - experimenter places marble in box.
One child leaves the room.
Experiementer moves marble.
Child asked where other child would say the marble was.
As age increases, answer changes - EXCEPT children with impaired social skills
In animals and pre-verbal children. Knower-guesser experimenters - food hidden then indicated by one of the experimenters. Chimps choose “knower” indicated locations in preference to “guesser”

Question 14

What are potential interpretations of knower-guesser visual perspective taking studies?

Answer 14

• Suggests chimps can do visual perspective taking
• may be using demonstrators as discriminatory cues without understanding the states of mind.
• simple association between person, signal and location of food, with no understanding of perspective
• Clever Hans effect - knowledgeable one more confident

Question 15

Outline another study of perspective taking in primates (retested in dogs)

Answer 15

Bishop and Young 2003 - choice of target when begging

• chimps will preferentailly beg from a non-blindfolded person, macaques will not
• in dogs, will solicit food from people who can see preferentially, even with “controls” wearing same apparatus but over different parts of face, BUT interestingly least begging solicited from person with book -> indicates likely past experience as will have encountered people will books who didn’t respond to their begging

Question 16

How does dog interpretation of human signals differ from primates?

Answer 16

Considerably less training required - (Mikloski et al)
Pointing/orientation/glance can influence dog choice of cup
- argued this was due to previous experience learning these signals
-> successfully learnt several new clues
-> unable to use novel marker by itself, need social info.
-> dogs do not follow human gaze if nothing is there
-> no significant improvement in skills with age, indicating not learnt

Question 17

What did Hare et al 2002 investigate?

Answer 17

Domestic dogs acquiring skills in using human social cues

• canid generalisation (very flexible in exploiting social information, inherited from wolves therefore skills should = that of wolves)
• human exposure hypothesis (dogs have greater exposure to humans - predicts greater exposure to humans will affect performance)
• Domestication hypothesis (selection pressure for specific skills of social cognition and communication - predicts dogs will be better than wolves regardless of experience)
  1. Dogs v chimps using human cues to find food. Dogs win.
  2. Dogs v wolves - all reared by humans. Dogs win.
  3. Dogs v wolves, Non-social task, no human clues. Perform equally well.
  4. Rearing environment and age of puppies tested - ability to sue cues doesn’t differ with either.
• > DOMESTICATION HYPOTHESIS LOOKS TO BE CORRECT

Question 18

Why are dogs better than chimps in human cue interpretation?

Answer 18

Adaptive value - dogs telling each other where food is = adaptive
Chimps - may share food but no adaptive value to telling conspecific there was a piece of fruit there.

Question 19

Give some studies showing domestication has lead to convergent social skills

Answer 19

Wobber 2009 - comparing breeds
Hare 2005 - studies of foxes suggesting byproduct of tameness
Gacsi 2009 Great individual variance in dogs

Question 20

Give a study disputing that wolves are not comparable to dogs in social tasks

Answer 20

Udell 2008 - with right rearing environment and daily interaction

Question 21

Winner/loser of social interactions impacts how dogs interact with both owner and other dog - give a study looking at this

Answer 21

Rooney and Bradshaw 2007

• dog human interactions - in SEEN trials, if human won, DOG approached more frequently, if dog won HUMAN approached more frequently
• UNSEEN trials opposite results found, but a significant difference still meaning individuals give off some signals to evoke these responses
• no evidence of dominance related effect

Question 22

Language acquisition - give a study supposedly showing this.

Answer 22

Kaminski 2004 with Rico the border collie

• reportedly knows over 200 items
• tested with owner giving commands, 37/40 correct
• fast mapping tested - unknown object introduced, asked with new command meaning the previously unseen object - 7/10 correct
• Retention tested - given 4 familiar, 4 unfamiliar and 1 previously unfamiliar but fast mapped object
• tested again 10 minutes later, 4/6 correct, tested again 4 weeks later, 3/6 correct

Question 23

What is the interpretation of Rico’s skill?

Answer 23

• Are the words referential? - does he know it means “sock” or is it just a command to pick up that object
• can he pick up other socks or just one object
• Rule of thumb/associative learning likely explanation
• Clever Hans effect in way owner gives commands?

Question 24

Which other studies have looked at language recognition in dogs?

Answer 24

Piley and Reid 2010 - Verbs aswell eg. fetch stick
Ulrike and Kimbrough - slow mapping of spoken words in a Yorkie
Vab der Zee 2012 - words generalised based on size not shape as humans do