"You talkin' to me?" - Dogs’ response depends on the breed!
Humans love to talk, not only with each other, but we often speak to the animals around us too. The researchers at the ELTE Department of Ethology have a significant history of discovering many interesting aspects of dogs’ word learning and speech-processing ability. They found that dogs are highly sensitive to human ostensive cues, as these special signals elicit intense attention and a willingness to learn in human infants and dogs as well. Many scientists agree that the sensitivity of dogs to ostensive communication could be one of the most important, dog-specific aspects of their domestication.
But how far can we go when considering every dog has the same cognitive features and abilities? Surely most of our readers are convinced that there are huge differences between the behavior of dog breeds. Based on a multitude of ethological publications, we have already learned that the best approach to breed-related behavioral differences is to conduct the experiments based either on ancestry (between-breed evolutionary distances), or on the basis of functional breed selection. Following the latter idea, Hungarian researchers recently found that cooperative working dogs (retrievers, pointers, herding dogs) more effectively learned a difficult detour task from a helpful human demonstrator than independent working breeds (sled dogs, terriers, sighthounds) did. But what could be the immediate cause of this interesting difference? Based on their aforementioned study, Petra Dobos (MSc student) with her mentor, Dr. Péter Pongrácz suspected that ostensive verbal cues are probably not equally effective for the various working dog breeds.
“Twenty years passed since we know that dogs will not learn almost anything from a human demonstrator in the detour task, if he or she walks around the obstacle without saying a word” told Péter Pongrácz as he remembered his classic experiments. “However, until now nobody tested whether the cooperative or independent dog breeds would pay keener attention to the demonstrator in the detour scenario. Similarly, it has been never tried if dogs would be interested in a demonstrator who speaks in a boring, neutral tone. Everyone simply accepted that dogs need ostensive intonation for their effective learning.”
To see, whether dogs would react differently to the various attention-eliciting attempts of the experimenter, in this new study the ethologists tested dogs from more than 30 cooperative and independent working dog breeds in the detour experiment. Petra Dobos introduces us to the details: “Half of the subjects I tested in the usual way. While I was walking around the V-shaped fence, and carried the reward to the inner corner, I kept the dogs’ attention on myself by calling their name in a lively, ostensive tone. However, for the other half of the dogs, I recited a little poem in a monotonous manner while I did the demonstration.”
The results showed that the so-called functional breed selection that created the main types of working dogs, could also have fundamental effects on the ways these dogs interact with us. The cooperative breeds learned from the demonstrator how to detour the obstacle faster, not only when Petra used the ostensive signals, but also when she recited the poem in a neutral tone. However, the independent working breeds did not improve their performance after either of the demonstrations. Petra highlighted the most interesting result: “We also analyzed, how much time the dogs actually spent with looking at my action while I demonstrated the task. We found that dogs in general watched longer when I used ostensive speech, but the cooperative dogs spent more time watching me in both conditions. Finally, we found that when the dogs watched the demonstration longer, they were more likely to successfully perform the task.”
This paper, freshly published in BMC Biology, further strengthened the notion that functional breed selection had a widespread influence on the most important socio-cognitive traits of the working dog breeds. It was also the first study in which we could learn about the potential importance of neutral speech during communication with our dogs.
Link to the paper: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-024-01983-1
Video abstract: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.26662573.v1
