Dogs (Canis familiaris) are Adapted to Receive Human Communication

Abstract

In recent years, evidence has been accumulating that domestic dogs (Canis familiaris)havespecializedskills in readinghuman-givencommunicativecues (e.g., pointing gestures). These skills seem to be the result of selection pressures during the process of domestication and therefore an adaptation to the dogs’ environment, namely human societies. Also, current evidence suggests that dogs’ understanding of human gestures is more flexible than was formerly thought. More specifically, dogs distinguish between intended communicative acts and non-intended but targetdirected behaviours, suggesting that dogs’ behaviour in this domain reflects important aspects of the comprehension of human communicative intentions. However, while children also eavesdrop on communicative interactions between third parties, dogs do not. This can be taken as evidence that dogs take human gestures as directives, while children see them as (sometimes) informative. Also dogs’ understanding of gestures seems to be generally more behaviourally based whereas children comprehend gestures in the context of joint attentional interactions. A species’ cognitive adaptations, like its morphological adaptations, reflect the ecological contexts in which it has evolved. Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) have evolved in a very special ecological context. Approximately fifteen thousand years ago, wolves (Canis lupus) entered human societies and were domesticated to become one of the most successful species on the planet, the domestic dog (Vila et al. 1997). Since then dogs have been part of human societies and interact with humans in many different ways; they help to hunt, to herd, to protect, etc. (Coppinger and Coppinger 2001). For living in the human world, dogs may have evolved specialized cognitive mechanisms which enable them to interact with human beings and which resemble some of humans’ cognitive skills (Hare and Tomasello 2005), making dogs an interesting model for questions regarding the evolution of cognition. J. Kaminski Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour, University of Cambridge, High Street, Madingley, Cambridge CB3 8AA UK e-mail: Kaminski@eva.mpg.de A. Berthoz and Y. Christen (eds.), Neurobiology of “Umwelt”: How Living Beings 103 Perceive the World, Research and Perspectives in Neurosciences, c © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009