Abstract
The impossible task paradigm has been extensively used to study the looking back behaviour in dogs. This behaviour is commonly considered a social problem-solving strategy: dogs facing an unsolvable task, soon give up and look back at the experimenter to ask for help. We aimed to test if the looking back in an impossible task does indeed represent a social problem-solving strategy. We used a modified version of the classic impossible task, in which the subjects simultaneously faced three possible and one impossible trials. Additionally, subjects were tested in four different conditions: social condition (with an unknown experimenter); asocial condition (subject alone); 'dummy' human condition (with a ‘dummy’ human); object condition (with a big sheet of cardboard). Finally, we compared two populations of dogs differing in their experience of receiving help from humans: 20 pet dogs tested in their houses and 31 free-ranging dogs tested in Morocco. We found that the pet dogs and free-ranging dogs had similar persistence in interacting with the impossible task in all conditions. Moreover, subjects looked back with similar latencies at the human, at the dummy human and at the object. Overall, pet dogs looked back longer at the human than free-ranging dogs. This could be interpreted as pet dogs being more attracted to humans and/or having a stronger association between humans and food than free-ranging dogs. Concluding, the looking back in an impossible task does not represent a problem-solving strategy. This behaviour seems rather linked to the subject’s persistence, to the salience of the stimuli presented, and potentially to the past reinforcement history.
Highlights
Humans look at each other in many situations and often directly at each other’s faces to collect information about others’ intentions and mental states
Persistence of manipulating the impossible bowl. Both the mixed model analysis and the Bayes factor analysis indicated that there was no effect of condition on persistence in Pet dogs (Pd) and Free-ranging dogs (FRd) and there was no difference in persistence between Pd and FRd in the social condition (Online Resource 1). (See Online Resource 3 reporting all raw data and Online Resource 4 reporting a summary of all data used in the analyses)
Latency to look back after trying to solve the impossible bowl. Both the mixed model analysis and the Bayes factor analysis indicated that there was no effect of condition on latency to look back in both Pd and FRd and there was no difference in latency to look back between Pd and FRd in the social condition (Online Resource 1)
Summary
Humans look at each other in many situations and often directly at each other’s faces to collect information about others’ intentions and mental states. Dogs gaze at their human partners in many different situations, which is often interpreted as serving similar functions as in humans (Hare and Tomasello 2005) This propensity to look at us has been suggested to have evolved during the domestication process enabling the close dog–human communication characterizing our relationship (Hare and Tomasello 2005; Hare et al 2002). In their seminal study, Miklósi et al (2003) compared the looking behaviour towards humans in an impossible task paradigm between dogs and human-socialized wolves, which likely resemble dogs’ closest non-domesticated ancestors (Lindblad-Toh et al 2005).
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