Abstract
Dogs’ production of referential communicative signals, i.e., showing, has gained increasing scientific interest over the last years. In this paper, we investigate whether shared information about the present and the past affects success and form of dog–human interactions. Second, in the context of showing, owners have always been treated as passive receivers of the dog’s signals. Therefore, we examined whether the owner’s behavior can influence the success and form of their dog’s showing behavior. To address these questions, we employed a hidden-object task with knowledgeable dogs and naïve owners. Shared information about the present was varied via the spatial set-up, i.e., position of hiding places, within dog–owner pairs, with two conditions requiring either high or low precision in indicating the target location. Order of conditions varied between pairs, representing differences in shared knowledge about the past (communication history). Results do not support an effect of communication history on either success or showing effort. In contrast, the spatial set-up was found to affect success and choice of showing strategies. However, dogs did not adjust their showing effort according to different spatial set-ups. Our results suggest that the latter could be due to the owner’s influence. Owner behavior generally increased the effort of their dog’s showing behavior which was stronger in the set-up requiring low showing precision. Moreover, our results suggest that owners could influence their dog’s showing accuracy (and thereby success) which, however, tended to be obstructive.
Highlights
Communication, most defined, is the transfer of information from one entity to another, most commonly described in terms of the sender–receiver model (Shannon and Weaver 1949)
Since we found that success rates of pairs were significantly above chance level, we could replicate the findings of previous showing studies (Gaunet 2008, 2010; Gaunet and Deputte 2011; Hare et al 1998; Heberlein et al 2016, 2017; Kaminski et al 2011; Miklósi et al 2000; Piotti and Kaminski 2016; Savalli et al 2014; Virányi et al 2006): dogs engage in showing behavior as defined by Miklósi et al (2000) to successfully indicate the location of a desired hidden object to their owners
This study confirmed that dogs use showing behavior to successfully communicate the location of a hidden object to their owner and, demonstrated that success in such a hidden-object paradigm can be truly attributed to dogs showing the target location
Summary
Communication, most defined, is the transfer of information from one entity to another, most commonly described in terms of the sender–receiver model (Shannon and Weaver 1949). Udell et al (2010) outline valid points supporting ontogenetic learning, especially during sensitive developmental phases, as source of this heightened sensitivity of dogs towards human communicative cues, currently more experimental evidence exists in favor of the domestication hypothesis than against it. We chose this hypothesis as the basis of our current study.
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