Physical and social cognition in domestic dogs: A comparative study

Cognition are emotionally activated in a context of reunion with their owners. Key words: dog; social cognition; heart rate variability (HRV); habituation/dishabituation test; emotional responses

49 were not directed toward the dogs. The emotional cue may have been weak and uncertain for the dogs. Therefore, dogs might be sensitive to their owners’ emotion. This ability to recognize emotion likely is useful in dog–human interaction. Key words: dog–human communication; emotion; spontaneous feeling

8 ARE DOGS SENSITIVE TO THE EMOTIONAL STATE OF HUMANS? Ayako Morisaki*, Akiko Takaoka, Kazuo Fujita Department of Letters, Otni University, Japan, Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University, Japan *Corresponding author: [email protected] Recognition of others’ emotions could be very important for interaction. This was a preliminary study on the ability of domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) to recognize human emotion. We examined whether the dogs’ behaviors changed with their owners’ emotional state. We videotaped dogs near their owners while the latter watched movies that evoked cheerful or sad feelings. The recordings showed that the dogs gazed at their owners for a longer period of time when the owners watched a cheerful movie than when the owners watched a sad movie. This result suggests that dogs may be sensitive to the emotional states of humans. Seventeen family dogs (8 males and 9 females of various breeds; mean age 5 5.11 years 6 2.0 SD) participated. All subjects had been living as indoor pets with their owners. Owners (3 males and 14 females) were all adults. Owners, wearing headphones, sat sideway to his or her dog and watched two 3-minute movies on a LCD screen. One movie was an animated ‘‘Tom and Jerry’’cartoon clip while the other movie was a segment from an animated version of ‘‘A Dog of Flanders.’’ The first movie was very cheerful and the second evoked sadness in owners. (‘‘A Dog of Flanders’’ is a very sad story for the Japanese.) Owners were asked how they felt (cheerful/sad) after the movies. The order of play of the movies was counterbalanced. The dog stayed in a pet enclosure (90 cm ! 90 cm) near the owner (about 40 cm away), and was able to behave freely. The dogs could not see the movies or hear the audio. Owners were instructed to concentrate on the movie during playback and not to look at their dog. We analyzed the behaviors of dogs while the owners were watching movies. Many kinds of dogs’ behaviors were recorded and individual differences were found. For example, one dog barked many times while another dog did not bark at all. The sum of time spent gazing at the owner for 3 minutes was not relatively different within dogs. A repeated-measures ANOVA of movie (2) ! movie order (2) showed a main effect of movie (F(1,15) 5 10.35, P , 0.01). Dogs gazed at their owner longer when the owner was watching the cheerful movie than the sad movie. The results showed that dogs gazed longer at their owners when they had cheerful feelings than when they experienced sad feelings. This suggests that dogs are sensitive to their owners’ emotional state. In this experiment, owners’ emotions

9 PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL COGNITION IN DOMESTIC DOGS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY Yvonne Lambach*, Esther Herrmann, Josep Call, Michael Tomasello Comparative and Developmental Psychology, MaxPlanck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany *Corresponding author: [email protected] Dogs have shown outstanding social cognitive skills when interacting with humans, especially in situations where social knowledge and communicative skills are needed. On the other hand, when tested on knowledge of objects or understanding of causality, domestic dogs did not prove to be particularly skilled and flexible when compared with other species. Brau¨er et al. (2006) showed that chimpanzees outperformed dogs in an object choice paradigm when causal cues were provided. However, chimpanzees failed to use social information given by the experimenter, whereas domestic dogs used several social communicative cues to receive a hidden food reward. To test whether these differences in performance hold true over a larger set of cognitive tests covering both physical and social cognition, we tested 97 domestic dogs modifying the Primate Cognition Test Battery (PCTB). This extensive test battery was developed by Herrmann et al. (2007) to investigate the cognitive abilities of great apes and human children and includes tests on knowledge of objects, quantities and causal understanding (physical domain) and social cognitive tasks like social learning, communication and knowledge of others’ actions and minds (social domain). Averaging across all of the tasks in the physical domain, dogs were correct in 45% of the trials, whereas chimpanzees succeeded in 68% of the trials. In the social domain, dogs performed correctly in 34% of the trials, and chimpanzees were correct in 39% of the trials. Statistically, chimpanzees outperformed dogs in physical cognitive tasks as well as in social cognitive tasks. Comparing the particular scales, we did find statistical differences between the species for all 3 scales of physical cognition as well as for tasks requiring knowledge of others’ actions and minds. Although domestic dogs and chimpanzees performed at a similar level over all communicative and social learning tasks, we did find species differences within single tasks. Our results show that chimpanzees outperform dogs not only in causal understanding, but also in a variety of other physical cognitive skills such as knowledge of space and

50 discrimination of quantities. However, the performance of dogs on the social domain does not allow an extension of the ‘‘social dog–causal ape’’ hypothesis put forward by Brau¨er et al. Domestic dogs performed significantly better when communicative and gestural cues are given but do not outperform chimpanzees on social cognition tasks in general. Furthermore, with the help of this test battery, we can not only compare dog cognition with cognitive abilities of other species but also test for individual performance and differences between the 2 species investigated. We also will be able to discuss the possible influence of multiple factors such as sex, age, training, and dog–owner relationship on the performance of domestic dogs in cognitive tasks. Key words: cognition; species differences; individual differences

References: Brau¨er, J., Kaminski, J., Riedel, J., Call, J., Tomasello, M., 2006. Making inferences about the location of hidden food: social dog, causal ape. J. Comp. Psychol 120, 38–47. Herrmann, E., Call, J., Hernandez-Lloreda, M., Hare, B., Tomasello, M., 2007. Humans have evolved specialized skills of social cognition: the cultural intelligence hypothesis. Science 317, 1360–1366.

10 AWAKE DOG BRAIN MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING Lilla To´th1,*, Ma´rta Ga´csi2, A´da´m Miklo´si2, Pe´ter Bogner1, Imre Repa1 1 Institute of Diagnostic Imaging and Radiation Oncology, University of Kaposva´r, Hungary 2 Department of Ethology, Eo¨tvo¨s Lora´nd University, Hungary *Corresponding author: [email protected] Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is one of the most popular modern imaging techniques both in human diagnostic and, increasingly, also in animal science. Social cognition refers to processes that subserve behavior in response to conspecifics. It has been shown by many ethologic studies that dogs have high social cognitive abilities with respect to humans and this raises the question of which kind of cerebral mechanisms play a role in the organization of these high socio-cognitive attainments. On the basis of the revealed behavioral analogies between humans and dogs, we plan to explore if functional and/or anatomic neurologic analogies also exist between humans and dogs in brain areas crucial in human socio-cognitive processes. The aim of this study was to investigate whether our new methodology is applicable in functional MRI of the brains of fully conscious and non-sedated dogs. Scanning awake dogs (without narcotics, anesthesia, or restraint) has been, so far, without precedent, because of several methodologic problems. We have worked out an examination method for awake dogs that includes a special training session in which we habituate and train the dogs stepby-step for functional MRI (fMRI) examination. During the

Journal of Veterinary Behavior, Vol 4, No 2, March/April 2009 training the subjects learn to ignore the noise and vibration of the magnetic resonance (MR) machine and remain immobile during the scan. Several MR images were acquired using a 1.5 T MR scanner, and Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM) was applied to the images postprocessing. We obtained appropriate anatomic images of 2 awake dogs’ brains that could be used for diagnostic and functional MRI interpretation. These images have comparable quality to images obtained from anesthetized dogs. In the case of fMRI, we have taken significant steps toward a universally usable research method. Although MRI studies on animal subjects have several methodologic difficulties, we developed a new method that can be used to carry out MRI or fMRI scans in dogs without the need for sedation or anesthesia. Our results could provide crucial information for veterinarians and researchers who investigate the neural mechanisms of animals’ responses to external stimuli. This technique also could be an alternative protocol, especially in cases when, for some reason, anesthesia is not possible. Key words: awake dog; functional MRI; new methodology 11 THE ROLE OF ASSOCIATION AND OF HUMAN INFORMATIVE GESTURES IN THE CONTROL OF SPATIAL SEARCH IN DOMESTIC DOGS (CANIS FAMILIARIS) Rebecca Ashton*, Carlo De Lillo Psychology, University of Leicester, United Kingdom *Corresponding author: [email protected] It has been reported that dogs are competent users of human gestures conveying information about the location of objects, such as the act of hiding bait in a Piagetian object permanence task. Nevertheless, dogs easily relapse into the A-not-B error that is evidence for more basic associative processes in similar tasks. We report the results of 3 experiments aimed at contrasting the effect of associative learning with the ability to use human informative gestures concerning the location of objects in a spatial search task. The methodology is based on a reversal learning paradigm, originally developed to assess whether different primate species learn to discriminate objects on the basis of the gradual development of associations or by using higher level mediational strategies that would support 1-trial learning (De Lillo and Visalberghi, 1994; Rumbaugh, 1971). In a spatial version of this paradigm, we initially trained dogs to identify which of 2 containers placed at different locations was foodbaited. We then measured reversal performance in conditions where either: (A) the reversal of the reward contingencies applied to both locations used during training, or (B) one of the locations involved in the original training was replaced by a novel location. Associative learning predicts a lower level of reversal performance in A (as the animal has to inhibit the acquired habit of responding to the correct location and, at the same time, overcome the inhibition of responses to the incorrect location) than in B, where one of these processes in made