Can Children of Different Ages Recognize Dog Communication Signals in Different Situations?

Petra Eretová,Helena Chaloupková,Marcela Hefferová,Eva Jozífková

doi:10.3390/ijerph17020506

Abstract

The presented study examines the ability of 265 children aged 4–12 years to correctly assign contextual cues and inner state values to a set of audio and audio-visual recordings of dog vocalizations and behaviors in different situations. Participants were asked to mark which situation each recording captured, what inner state of the dog it showed, and what inner state a human would feel in the same situation. Recognition of the inner state of dogs was affected by the age of the child when evaluating the audio recordings (p < 0.001), and such a tendency was revealed in evaluating the audiovisual materials (p = 0.08). The inner state of dog evaluation was associated with both the situation assessment (p < 0.01) and human inner state (p < 0.001) in the case of audio recordings, but it was only correlated with situation assessment in audio-visual recordings (p < 0.01). The contextual situations were recognized by the participants only in the audio materials, with “stranger” being the best recognized situation, while “play” was the least recognized. Overall, children aged 4–5 years showed a limited ability to understand dog signals compared to children aged 6–12 years, who were successful in recognizing the dogs’ stimuli more than 80% of the time. Therefore, children younger than 6 years of age require increased supervision when interacting with dogs.

Highlights

A long-term study in the United States [1] has shown that children under 10 years of age are the most common victims of dog attacks, and they are most likely to sustain fatal injuries
The probability was lower that they would correctly assign audio playbacks compared to the older children (Figure 3a)
This study supports the existence of children’s ability to correctly classify dog behavioral cues, which develops after the age of 6

Summary

Introduction

A long-term study in the United States [1] has shown that children under 10 years of age are the most common victims of dog attacks, and they are most likely to sustain fatal injuries. One of the cited reasons for this is the potentially under-developed ability of preschool children to correctly recognize communication signals from dogs. An example of this is the significant difference in meaning of exposed teeth in people and dogs, i.e., what might look like a smile to a young child can be a serious threat. One study [5] confirmed the ability of children aged

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