Abstract
Dogs are renowned for being skilful at using human-given communicative cues such as pointing. Results are contradictory, however, when it comes to dogs' following human gaze, probably due to methodological discrepancies. Here we investigated whether dogs follow human gaze to one of two food locations better than into distant space even after comparable pre-training. In Experiments 1 and 2, the gazing direction of dogs was recorded in a gaze-following into distant space and in an object-choice task where no choice was allowed, in order to allow a direct comparison between tasks, varying the ostensive nature of the gazes. We found that dogs only followed repeated ostensive human gaze into distant space, whereas they followed all gaze cues in the object-choice task. Dogs followed human gaze better in the object-choice task than when there was no obvious target to look at. In Experiment 3, dogs were tested in another object-choice task and were allowed to approach a container. Ostensive cues facilitated the dogs’ following gaze with gaze as well as their choices: we found that dogs in the ostensive group chose the indicated container at chance level, whereas they avoided this container in the non-ostensive group. We propose that dogs may perceive the object-choice task as a competition over food and may interpret non-ostensive gaze as an intentional cue that indicates the experimenter's interest in the food location she has looked at. Whether ostensive cues simply mitigate the competitive perception of this situation or they alter how dogs interpret communicative gaze needs further investigation. Our findings also show that following gaze with one's gaze and actually choosing one of the two containers in an object-choice task need to be considered as different variables. The present study clarifies a number of questions related to gaze-following in dogs and adds to a growing body of evidence showing that human ostensive cues can strongly modify dog behaviour.
Highlights
Communication is defined as the transmission of information between a signaller and a receiver, with both partners benefiting from the interaction [1]
Analysing whether the dogs looked in the indicated direction, we found that in the distant space task, the dogs were less likely to look to the indicated side than when tested with the two containers
We found that the dogs were more likely to look to either side in the object-choice task than in the distant space task in which they more often remained watching the experimenter after the gaze cue
Summary
Communication is defined as the transmission of information (signal) between a signaller and a receiver, with both partners benefiting from the interaction [1]. After the receiver’s attention has been called, by means of referential signals the sender can direct the attention of the receiver to a target, i.e. a third person, an object or an event [9]. This can be achieved by using global body orientation, deictic and iconic manual gestures, such as pointing, more subtle forms of visual orientation such as turning the face or only the eyes to a certain direction, and other attention-directing tactile or auditory signals [9,10]
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