Do domestic dogs understand human actions as goal-directed?

Sarah Marshall-Pescini,Maria Ceretta,Emanuela Prato-Previde,Juliane Kaminski

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0106530

Abstract

Understanding of other’s actions as goal-directed is considered a fundamental ability underlying cognitive and social development in human infants. A number of studies using the habituation-dishabituation paradigm have shown that the ability to discern intentional relations, in terms of goal-directedness of an action towards an object, appears around 5 months of age. The question of whether non-human species can perceive other’s actions as goal-directed has been more controversial, however there is mounting evidence that at least some primates species do. Recently domestic dogs have been shown to be particularly sensitive to human communicative cues and more so in cooperative and intentional contexts. Furthermore, they have been shown to imitate selectively. Taken together these results suggest that dogs may perceive others' actions as goal-directed, however no study has investigated this issue directly. In the current study, adopting an infant habituation-dishabituation paradigm, we investigated whether dogs attribute intentions to an animate (a human) but not an inanimate (a black box) agent interacting with an object. Following an habituation phase in which the agent interacted always with one of two objects, two sets of 3 trials were presented: new side trials (in which the agent interacted with the same object as in the habituation trial but placed in a novel location) and new goal trials (in which the agent interacted with the other object placed in the old location). Dogs showed a similar pattern of response to that shown in infants, looking longer in the new goal than new side trials when they saw the human agent interact with the object. No such difference emerging with the inanimate agent (the black box). Results provide the first evidence that a non-primate species can perceive another individual’s actions as goal-directed. We discuss results in terms of the prevailing mentalisitic and non-mentalistic hypotheses regarding goal-attribution.

Highlights

Intention attribution is considered a fundamental ability underlying much of cognitive, social and linguistic development in human infants and much debate has revolved around when infants start viewing other’s actions as intentional [1,2]
The habituation rate, proportion of dogs habituating and duration of looking time in the latter three habituation trials was comparable across groups, and comparable to results from the infant literature
Dogs showed a similar pattern of results to human infants and marmosets, in that they looked significantly longer at the new goal trials compared to the new side trials when the actor was an animate agent but not when the agent-object interaction was performed by an inanimate agent [7,9,19,20]

Summary

Introduction

Intention attribution is considered a fundamental ability underlying much of cognitive, social and linguistic development in human infants and much debate has revolved around when infants start viewing other’s actions as intentional [1,2]. Further studies using a similar paradigm have shown that infants attribute goal-directedness to animate but not inanimate agents [7,9] ( inanimate agents can ‘have goals’ if they exhibit certain features [10,11]) and to deliberate but not accidental actions towards an object [12,13] Overall, these findings suggest that infants represent actions as organized by the relation between agent and object: there is currently a lively debate around the question as to whether infant’s ability to understand such a relation is based on their interpretation of the mental connections between the agent and the object (e.g. the actor ‘wants/prefers’ that particular target) [13] or whether results can be thoroughly explained by a more functional interpretation where goals are defined as the perceivable outcomes (or targets) of specific actions and inferential reasoning about the relationship between the elements is sufficient to allow infants to ‘solve’ such apparently mentalistic questions [14]

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Conclusion