Abstract
The ability to infer emotional states and their wider consequences requires the establishment of relationships between the emotional display and subsequent actions. These abilities, together with the use of emotional information from others in social decision making, are cognitively demanding and require inferential skills that extend beyond the immediate perception of the current behaviour of another individual. They may include predictions of the significance of the emotional states being expressed. These abilities were previously believed to be exclusive to primates. In this study, we presented adult domestic dogs with a social interaction between two unfamiliar people, which could be positive, negative or neutral. After passively witnessing the actors engaging silently with each other and with the environment, dogs were given the opportunity to approach a food resource that varied in accessibility. We found that the available emotional information was more relevant than the motivation of the actors (i.e. giving something or receiving something) in predicting the dogs’ responses. Thus, dogs were able to access implicit information from the actors’ emotional states and appropriately use the affective information to make context-dependent decisions. The findings demonstrate that a non-human animal can actively acquire information from emotional expressions, infer some form of emotional state and use this functionally to make decisions.
Highlights
Some animal species can use the behavioural changes of others to identify cues predictive of their motivations and intentions (Call et al 2004), and associate emotional cues with specific outcomes to direct their behaviour (Buttelmann and Tomasello 2013; Buttelmann et al 2009; Morimoto and Fujita 2012; Waller et al 2016)
Optimal decisions depend on the extent to which individuals have inferential skills that extend beyond the perception of the current behaviour of another individual and their ability to make predictions of the functional significance of emotional states
They must be able to infer the emotional states of people from representations they have generated and stored in their memory, probably based on their previous experience with each type of stimulus. This ability has only previously been demonstrated in humans. We show that it occurs in dogs even when the information is only available from the passive observation of third-party interactions with emotional reactions that are triggered by a neutral object and are not directed towards the dog
Summary
Some animal species can use the behavioural changes of others to identify cues predictive of their motivations and intentions (Call et al 2004), and associate emotional cues with specific outcomes to direct their behaviour (Buttelmann and Tomasello 2013; Buttelmann et al 2009; Morimoto and Fujita 2012; Waller et al 2016) It is unknown whether non-human individuals can infer the potential consequences of others’ emotional expressions to make decisions in ecologically relevant contexts. Anticipating others’ behaviour and adjusting one’s own behaviour according to environmental demands to obtain access to resources and increase fitness is cognitively challenging but highly advantageous, and so may affect how animals behave and make decisions (McFarland et al 2013) Such abilities may affect what tactics individuals may use when engaging with their surroundings (Eschar et al 2016).
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