Dogs wait longer for better rewards than wolves in a delay of gratification task: but why?

Friederike Range,Zsófia Virányi,Désirée Brucks

doi:10.1007/s10071-020-01346-7

Friederike Range, Zsófia Virányi + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-020-01346-7

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Abstract

Self-control has been shown to be linked with being cooperative and successful in humans and with the g-factor in chimpanzees. As such, it is likely to play an important role in all forms of problem-solving. Self-control, however, does not just vary across individuals but seems also to be dependent on the ecological niche of the respective species. With dogs having been selected to live in the human environment, several domestication hypotheses have predicted that dogs are better at self-control and thus more tolerant of longer delays than wolves. Here we set out to test this prediction by comparing dogs’ and wolves’ self-control abilities using a delay of gratification task where the animals had to wait for a predefined delay duration to exchange a low-quality reward for a high-quality reward. We found that in our task, dogs outperformed the wolves waiting an average of 66 s vs. 24 s in the wolves. Food quality did not influence how long the animals waited for the better reward. However, dogs performed overall better in motivation trials than the wolves, although the dogs’ performance in those trials was dependent on the duration of the delays in the test trials, whereas this was not the case for the wolves. Overall, the data suggest that selection by humans for traits influencing self-control rather than ecological factors might drive self-control abilities in wolves and dogs. However, several other factors might contribute or explain the observed differences including the presence of the humans, which might have inhibited the dogs more than the wolves, lower motivation of the wolves compared to the dogs to participate in the task and/or wolves having a better understanding of the task contingencies. These possible explanations need further exploration.

Highlights

The ability to stop an immediate behaviour in favor of a more advantageous behaviour has been termed ‘inhibitory control’
Comparing our dog results with previously published research on dogs, while one dog in each study tolerated high delays, the mean delay tolerated by our dogs was almost twice as long as the one reached by the 12 pet dogs in Brucks et al (2017b) study
Our animals at the Wolf Science Center are kept under more standardized conditions than pet dogs that receive individualized training by their owners and have vastly variable life experiences

Summary

Introduction

The ability to stop an immediate behaviour in favor of a more advantageous behaviour has been termed ‘inhibitory control’. Wascher et al 2012; Auersperg et al 2013; Hillemann et al 2014; Brucks et al 2017a, b). Individuals vary in their performance (Wascher et al 2012; Auersperg et al 2013; Hillemann et al 2014; Brucks et al 2017b), which seems to be at least partly dependent on the behavioural patterns adopted during the delay (Evans and Beran 2007; Koepke et al 2015). Human children that were able to distract themselves by playing outperformed children that focused on the reward (Steelandt et al 2012). Dogs that dozed or looked away performed better than dogs that gazed at the rewards (Brucks et al 2017b)

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