Dogs (Canis familiaris) prioritize independent exploration over looking back.

Abstract

It has been suggested that over the course of domestication, dogs developed the propensity to "look back" or gaze at humans when they encounter a challenging task. Unfortunately, little work to date has addressed the question of why dogs look back. To explore this issue, we conducted 3 experiments in which dogs had the option of doing something other than looking back at their owner when encountering an unsolvable task. In Experiments 1 and 2, dogs could look back or attempt an alternative puzzle. In both experiments, dogs attempted the alternative puzzle prior to looking back. In Experiment 3, when dogs encountered the unsolvable task, they could look back or attempt to solve the same puzzle using an alternate approach. As in Experiments 1 and 2, dogs attempted the alternate approach prior to looking back. Although some scholars have suggested that dogs may look back because they are overly reliant on humans, our findings suggest that dogs may instead prioritize independent exploration over looking back. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).