How do communicative cues shape the way that dogs (Canis familiaris) encode objects?

Abstract

Our human capacity to efficiently learn from other individuals is unparalleled in any nonhuman species. Some scholars argue that our propensity to learn socially is supported by an early-emerging expectation that communicative cues will convey generic information (Csibra & Gergely, 2011). In the current 2 studies, we examine whether this expectation about generic information is unique to humans by testing a species that readily attends to human cues-dogs. Specifically, we adapted a violation of expectation paradigm previously used with human infants to examine whether communicative cues lead dogs to selectively encode generic, kind-relevant information about objects (e.g., shape). Prior work has demonstrated that human infants are more likely to notice unexpected changes in kind-relevant information in communicative contexts (i.e., when an agent points to the object; Yoon et al., 2008). In contrast, across 2 studies (N = 136), dogs were no more likely to notice kind-relevant changes in communicative contexts than noncommunicative contexts. These findings suggest that although dogs attend to human communicative cues, such cues do not shape the way that dogs encode objects. More broadly, this finding lends support to the claim that our early-emerging generic expectation crucially supports our human capacity to efficiently learn from one another. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).