Social learning from humans or conspecifics: differences and similarities between wolves and dogs

Zsófia Virányi,Friederike Range

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00868

Abstract

Most domestication hypotheses propose that dogs have been selected for enhanced communication and interactions with humans, including learning socially from human demonstrators. However, to what extent these skills are newly derived and to what extent they originate from wolf–wolf interactions is unclear. In order to test for the possible origins of dog social cognition, we need to compare the interactions of wolves and dogs with humans and with conspecifics. Here, we tested identically raised and kept juvenile wolves and dogs in a social learning task with human and conspecific demonstrators. Using a local enhancement task, we found that both wolves and dogs benefitted from a demonstration independent of the demonstrator species in comparison to a control, no demonstration condition. Interestingly, if the demonstrator only pretended to hide food at the target location, wolves and dogs reacted differently: while dogs differentiated between this without-food and with-food demonstration independent of the demonstrator species, wolves only did so in case of human demonstrators. We attribute this finding to wolves being more attentive toward behavioral details of the conspecific models than the dogs: although the demonstrator dogs were trained to execute the demonstration, they disliked the food reward, which might have decreased the interest of the wolves in finding the food reward. Overall, these results suggest that dogs but also wolves can use information provided by both human and conspecific demonstrators in a local enhancement task. Therefore we suggest that a more fine-scale analysis of dog and wolf social learning is needed to determine the effects of domestication.

Highlights

Intense research in the last few decades has revealed dogs’ exciting communicative and cooperative skills with humans (Naderi et al, 2001; Szetei et al, 2003; Viranyi et al, 2004; Schwab and Huber, 2006; Kaminski et al, 2012)
THE EFFECT OF A DEMONSTRATION We found that both dogs and wolves were more likely to find the chick after observing a demonstrator than if no demonstration had been provided
Dogs were more likely to find the chick than wolves in all trials independent of whether the demonstrator was a dog or a human or whether there was a demonstration or not suggesting that either dogs were more motivated to search for the chick or that, at least partly, they were more successful in using their sense of smell to find the chick

Summary

Introduction

Intense research in the last few decades has revealed dogs’ exciting communicative and cooperative skills with humans (Naderi et al, 2001; Szetei et al, 2003; Viranyi et al, 2004; Schwab and Huber, 2006; Kaminski et al, 2012) These abilities are often assumed to originate partly from the dogs’ evolutionary adaptation to the human environment (Hare et al, 2002; Miklosi et al, 2003; Hare and Tomasello, 2005) and partly from their life-long experiences with humans (Udell et al, 2010; Miklosi and Topal, 2011). We set out to compare wolves and dogs that were socialized with humans, conspecifics and several pet dogs to a similar extent, in a social learning task using both human and dog demonstrators

Methods

Results

Conclusion