Abstract
It is an intriguing question whether cats’ social understanding capacity, including the sensitivity to ostensive signals (resulting in fast preferential learning of behavioural choices demonstrated by humans), would be comparable to that in dogs. In a series of A-not-B error tests, we investigated whether the ostensive or non-ostensive manner of human communication and the familiarity of the human demonstrator would affect the search error pattern in companion cats. Cats’ performance showed an almost completely different distribution of perseverative erring than earlier was shown in dogs and human infants. Cats demonstrated perseverative errors both during ostensive and non-ostensive cueing by the owner and also during non-ostensive cueing by the experimenter. However, unlike prior studies with dogs, they avoided perseverative errors during the experimenter ostensive cueing condition. We assume that the reliance on human ostensive signals may serve different purpose in companion dogs and cats—meanwhile in dogs, human ostension could support fast rule learning, in cats, it may have only a circumstantial attention-eliciting effect. Our results highlight the need of conducting further throughout experiments on the social cognition of cats, based on their own right beside the traditional cat–dog comparative approach.
Highlights
According to the ‘natural pedagogy’ theory (Csibra and Gergely 2009), by paying dedicated attention to those actions of an adult that are accompanied by ostensive verbal cueing, human infants can rapidly learn such behavioural patterns (i.e. ‘rules’, search strategies) that otherwise would require elaborate explanation—obviously beyond the cognitive reach of a 10–12-month old infant
It has been found that companion dogs behave very to toddlers in a Piagetian two-way search task—as individuals of both species showed strong preference for the location that was previously enhanced by ostensive signals by the demonstrator— committing the so-called A-not-B
Far, the only paper where the effect of human ostensive signals on cats was tested, showed a minimal effect only—the performance of cats in a gaze-following test was not affected by the presence or absence of ostensive signals, only the speed of establishing eye contact with the subject was enhanced by the ostensive cues (Pongrácz et al 2019)
Summary
According to the ‘natural pedagogy’ theory (Csibra and Gergely 2009), by paying dedicated attention to those actions of an adult that are accompanied by ostensive verbal cueing, human infants can rapidly learn such behavioural patterns (i.e. ‘rules’, search strategies) that otherwise would require elaborate explanation—obviously beyond the cognitive reach of a 10–12-month old infant. It has been found that companion dogs behave very to toddlers in a Piagetian two-way search task—as individuals of both species showed strong preference for the location that was previously enhanced by ostensive signals by the demonstrator— committing the so-called A-not-B (perseverative). The evolution of human-analogous socio-cognitive skills through domestication has strong empirical support from the past 2 decades of scientific investigations of dog behaviour (e.g., Kubinyi et al 2007; Kaminski and Marshall-Pescini 2014). Far, the only paper where the effect of human ostensive signals on cats was tested, showed a minimal effect only—the performance of cats in a gaze-following test was not affected by the presence or absence of ostensive signals, only the speed of establishing eye contact with the subject was enhanced by the ostensive cues (Pongrácz et al 2019)
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