Dogs may have earned the title of "man's best friend" because of their good dealings with people. Those social skills may be present rather than learned shortly after birth, a new study by University of Arizona researchers suggests. The study also finds that genetics may help explain why some dogs outperform others on social tasks, such as following pointers.
"There was some evidence that these kinds of social skills were present in adulthood, but here we find evidence that puppies — a bit like humans — are biologically primed to interact in these social ways," said lead study author Emily Bray, a postdoctoral fellow. research associate at the UArizona School of Anthropology in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Bray has spent the past ten years researching dogs in collaboration with California-based Canine Companions, a service dog organization that serves clients with physical disabilities. She and her colleagues hope to better understand how dogs think and solve problems, which could have implications for identifying dogs that would make good service animals.
To better understand the role of biology in dogs' ability to communicate with humans, Bray and her collaborators looked at how 375 of the organization's 8-week-old budding service dogs, who had little previous one-on-one interaction with people performed on a range of tasks designed to measure their social communication skills.
Because the researchers knew each puppy's pedigree — and thus how related they were — they were also able to see if hereditary genes explain differences in dogs' abilities. Genetics explained over 40% of the variation in puppies' ability to follow human pointing gestures, as well as variation in how long they had eye contact with people during a task designed to measure their interest in people.
“People have been interested in the ability of dogs to do things like this for a long time, but there has always been discussion about how much this is really in the biology of dogs, rather than something they learn by interacting with humans. said study co-author Evan MacLean. “We found that there is definitely a strong genetic component, and they certainly do from the start.”
At the time of the study, the puppies were still living with their littermates and had not yet been sent to a volunteer puppy educator. Therefore, their interactions with humans were limited, making it unlikely that the behavior was learned, Bray said.
The researchers got the puppies to perform four different tasks. In one task, a researcher hid a treat under one of the two inverted cups and pointed to it to see if the puppy could follow the gesture. To make sure the puppies didn't just follow their noses, a treat was also taped to the inside of both cups. In another version of the task, puppies watched the researchers place a yellow block next to the correct cup, rather than pointing it, to indicate where the puppy should look for the food.
The other two tasks were designed to observe puppies' tendency to look at human faces. In one task, the researchers spoke to the puppies in "dog-guided speech," reciting a script in the kind of high-pitched voice people sometimes use when talking to a baby. They then measured how long the puppy looked at the human. In the final task – a so-called “unsolvable task” – researchers sealed a treat in a closed container and presented it to the puppy, then measured how often the puppy looked to the human for help opening the container.
While many of the puppies responded to people's physical and verbal cues, few looked to humans for help with the unsolvable task. That suggests that while puppies can be born and know how to respond to human-initiated communication, the ability to initiate communication on their own may come later.
“In studies of adult dogs, we see that they tend to look to humans for help, especially when you look at adult dogs versus wolves. Wolves will persevere and try to solve problems on their own, while dogs are more likely to look to the social partner for help," Bray said. “In puppies, this help-seeking behavior didn't really seem to be part of their repertoire yet.”
In many ways, that reflects what we see in children's development, Bray said. “If you think about language learning, kids can understand what we're saying to them before they can physically produce the words,” she said. “It may be a similar story with puppies; they understand what is being conveyed to them socially, but producing it on their side will probably take a little longer, development wise.”
