Synchronous citizen science with dogs.

Citizen science approaches have grown in popularity over the years, partly due to their ability to reach a wider audience and produce more generalizable samples. In dogs, these studies, though, have been limited in their controls over materials or experimental protocols, with guardians typically reporting results without researcher supervision. Over two studies, we explored and validated a synchronous citizen science approach. We had dog guardians act as experimenters while being supervised by a researcher over Zoom. In study 1, we demonstrated that synchronous citizen science produced equivalent levels of performance to in-lab designs in a choice task. Consistent with past in-lab research, dogs selected a treat (vs. an empty plate) in a two-alternative forced-choice task. In study 2, we showed that Zoom methods are also appropriate for studies utilizing looking time measures. We explored dogs' looking behaviors when a bag of treats was placed in an unreachable location, and dogs' guardians were either attentive or inattentive while dogs attempted to retrieve the treats. Consistent with past work, dogs in the attentive condition looked at their guardian for longer periods and had a shorter latency to first look than dogs in the inattentive condition. Overall, we have demonstrated that synchronous citizen science studies with dogs are feasible and produce valid results consistent with those found in a typical lab setting.

Pet dogs (Canis familiaris) re-engage humans after joint activity.

Joint intentionality, the mutual understanding of shared goals or actions to partake in a common task, is considered an essential building block of theory of mind in humans. Domesticated dogs are unusually adept at comprehending human social cues and cooperating with humans, making it possible that they possess behavioral signatures of joint intentionality in interactions with humans. Horschler and colleagues (Anim Behav 183: 159-168, 2022) examined joint intentionality in a service dog population, finding that upon interruption of a joint experience, dogs preferentially re-engaged their former partner over a passive bystander, a behavior argued to be a signature of joint intentionality in human children. In the current study, we aimed to replicate and extend these results in pet dogs. One familiar person played with the dog and then abruptly stopped. We examined if dogs would preferentially re-engage the player instead of a familiar bystander who was also present. Consistent with the findings of Horschler and colleagues (Anim Behav 183: 159-168, 2022), pet dogs preferentially gazed toward and offered the toy to the player significantly more than the familiar bystander. However, no difference was observed in physical contact. These findings provide preliminary evidence for behavioral signatures of joint intentionality in pet dogs, but future work is needed to understand whether this phenomenon extends to other contexts.

Training differences predict dogs' (Canis lupus familiaris) preferences for prosocial others.

Humans evaluate other agents' behavior on a variety of different dimensions, including morally, from a very early age. For example, human infants as young as 6-months old prefer prosocial over antisocial others and demonstrate negative evaluations of antisocial others in a variety of paradigms (Hamlin et al. in Nature 450(7169):557, 2007; Dev Sci 13(6):923-929, 2010; Proc Natl Acad Sci 108(50):19931-19936, 2011). While these tendencies are well documented in the human species, less is known about whether similar preference emerge in non-human animals. Here, we explore this question by testing prosocial preferences in one non-human species: the domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris). Given the ubiquity of dog-human social interactions, it is possible that dogs display human-like social evaluation tendencies. Unfortunately, prior research examining social evaluation in dogs has produced mixed results. To assess whether differences in methodology or training differences account for these contrasting results, we tested two samples of dogs with different training histories on an identical social evaluation task. Trained agility dogs approached a prosocial actor significantly more often than an antisocial actor, while untrained pet dogs showed no preference for either actor. These differences across dogs with different training histories suggest that while dogs may demonstrate preferences for prosocial others in some contexts, their social evaluation abilities are less flexible and less robust compared to those of humans.

In sickness and in filth: Developing a disdain for dirty people.

Cleanliness is universally valued, and people who are dirty are routinely marginalized. In this research, we measured the roots of negative attitudes toward physically unclean individuals and examined the differences that exist in these attitudes between childhood and adulthood. We presented 5- to 9-year-old children and adults (total N = 260) with paired photographs of a dirty person and a clean person, and we measured biases with a selective trust task and an explicit evaluation task. In Study 1, where images of adults were evaluated, both children and adults demonstrated clear biases, but adults were more likely to selectively trust the clean informant. Study 2 instead used images of children and included several additional tasks measuring implicit attitudes (e.g., an implicit association task) and overt behaviors (a resource distribution task) and also manipulated the cause of dirtiness to include illness, enjoyment of filth, and accidental spillage. Children and adults again revealed strong biases regardless of the cause of dirtiness, but only children exhibited a bias on the explicit evaluation task. Study 3 replicated these findings in India, a country that has historically endorsed strong purity norms. Overall, this research indicates that dirty people are targets of discrimination from early in development, that this is not merely a Western phenomenon, and that this pervasive bias is most strongly directed at individuals of similar ages.

Preferences for Explanation Generality Develop Early in Biology But Not Physics.

One of the core functions of explanation is to support prediction and generalization. However, some explanations license a broader range of predictions than others. For instance, an explanation about biology could be presented as applying to a specific case (e.g., "this bear") or more generally across "all animals." The current study investigated how 5- to 7-year-olds (N = 36), 11- to 13-year-olds (N = 34), and adults (N = 79) evaluate explanations at varying levels of generality in biology and physics. Findings revealed that even the youngest children preferred general explanations in biology. However, only older children and adults preferred explanation generality in physics. Findings are discussed in light of differences in our intuitions about biological and physical principles.

Dogs do not demonstrate a human-like bias to defer to communicative cues.

Human children and domesticated dogs learn from communicative cues, such as pointing, in highly similar ways. In two experiments, we investigate whether dogs are biased to defer to these cues in the same way as human children. We tested dogs on a cueing task similar to one previously conducted in human children. Dogs received conflicting information about the location of a treat from a Guesser and a Knower, who either used communicative cues (i.e., pointing; Experiments 1 and 2), non-communicative physical cues (i.e., a wooden marker; Experiment 1), or goal-directed actions (i.e., grasping; Experiment 2). Although human children tested previously struggled to override inaccurate information provided by the Guesser when she used communicative cues, in contrast to physical cues or goal-directed actions, dogs were more likely to override the Guesser's information when she used communicative cues or goal-directed actions than when she used non-communicative physical cues. Given that dogs did not show the same selective bias towards the Guesser's information in communicative contexts, these findings provide clear evidence that dogs do not demonstrate a human-like bias to defer to communicative cues. Instead, dogs may be more likely to critically evaluate information presented via communicative cues than either physical or non-communicative cues.

Exploring the evolutionary origins of overimitation: a comparison across domesticated and non-domesticated canids.

When learning from others, human children tend to faithfully copy - or 'overimitate' - the actions of a demonstrator, even when these actions are irrelevant for solving the task at hand. We investigate whether domesticated dogs (Canis familiaris) and dingoes (Canis dingo) share this tendency to overimitate in three experiments. In Experiment 1, dogs and dingoes had the opportunity to solve a puzzle after watching an ostensive demonstrator who used both a relevant action and an irrelevant action. We find clear evidence against overimitation in both species. In contrast to human children (Horner & Whiten, 2005), dogs and dingoes used the irrelevant action less often across trials, suggesting that both species were filtering out the irrelevant action as they gained experience with the puzzle (like chimpanzees; Horner & Whiten, 2005). Experiments 2 and 3 provide further evidence against overimitation, demonstrating that both species' behavior is better characterized by individual exploration than overimitation. Given that both species, particularly dogs, show human-like social learning in other contexts, these findings provide additional evidence that overimitation may be a unique aspect of human social learning. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/g2mRniJZ7aU.

Little Bayesians or little Einsteins? Probability and explanatory virtue in children's inferences.

Like scientists, children seek ways to explain causal systems in the world. But are children scientists in the strict Bayesian tradition of maximizing posterior probability? Or do they attend to other explanatory considerations, as laypeople and scientists - such as Einstein - do? Four experiments support the latter possibility. In particular, we demonstrate in four experiments that 4- to 8-year-old children, like adults, have a robust latent scope bias that leads to inferences that do not maximize posterior probability. When faced with two explanations equally consistent with observed data, where one explanation makes an unverified prediction, children consistently preferred the explanation that does not make this prediction (Experiment 1), even if the prior probabilities are identical (Experiment 3). Additional evidence suggests that this latent scope bias may result from the same explanatory strategies used by adults (Experiments 1 and 2), and can be attenuated by strong prior odds (Experiment 4). We argue that children, like adults, rely on 'explanatory virtues' in inference - a strategy that often leads to normative responses, but can also lead to systematic error.

Another way to learn about teaching: What dogs can tell us about the evolution of pedagogy.

Kline argues that it is crucial to isolate the respective roles of teaching and learning in order to understand how pedagogy has evolved. We argue that doing so requires testing species that learn from pedagogy but that rarely teach themselves. Here, we review how one previously neglected species - domesticated dogs (Canis familiaris) - may allow researchers to do just that.

Gaze in cats (Felis catus) and dogs (Canis lupus familiaris).

Within human-animal dyadic interactions, dog-human gaze has been identified as the crux of several important visual behaviors, such as looking back, gaze-following, and participation in an oxytocin feedback loop. It has been posited that this gaze behavior may have been motivated and sustained by cooperative relationships between dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) and humans (e.g., hunting, service roles), however, to investigate why gaze evolved, a comparison to a domesticated species that lacks a protracted history of cooperative companionship is needed: the domestic cat (Felis catus). In this study, we compare the gaze duration to owners of cats and dogs in a community science setting. We replicated previous gaze studies with dogs, wolves (Nagasawa et al., 2015), and dingoes (Johnston et al., 2017), requesting owners to sit with their pets for 5 min and interact as they normally would. Cats and dogs gazed at their owners for similar durations, but durations of petting and physical contact were significantly lower with cats. Gaze correlated significantly with vocalizations in dogs; however, no other correlations were significant. Dogs gazed less in our community science setting than dogs tested previously in-lab (Nagasawa et al., 2015). Ultimately, cats resemble dogs in their general gaze patterns, but not in most interactions with their owner. Future research should aim to include feral cats or wild cat species to shed light on gaze behavior development in the genus, while more community science work can identify the behaviors that shift for dogs between familiar and unfamiliar environments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

When do children trust the expert? Benevolence information influences children's trust more than expertise.

How do children use informant niceness, meanness, and expertise when choosing between informant claims and crediting informants with knowledge? In Experiment 1, preschoolers met two experts providing conflicting claims for which only one had relevant expertise. Five-year-olds endorsed the relevant expert's claim and credited him with knowledge more often than 3-year-olds. In Experiment 2, niceness/meanness information was added. Although children most strongly preferred the nice relevant expert, the children often chose the nice irrelevant expert when the relevant one was mean. In Experiment 3, a mean expert was paired with a nice non-expert. Although this nice informant had no expertise, preschoolers continued to endorse his claims and credit him with knowledge. Also noteworthy, children in all three experiments seemed to struggle more to choose the relevant expert's claim than to credit him with knowledge. Together, these experiments demonstrate that niceness/meanness information can powerfully influence how children evaluate informants.

Dogs (Canis familiaris) prioritize independent exploration over looking back.

It has been suggested that over the course of domestication, dogs developed the propensity to "look back" or gaze at humans when they encounter a challenging task. Unfortunately, little work to date has addressed the question of why dogs look back. To explore this issue, we conducted 3 experiments in which dogs had the option of doing something other than looking back at their owner when encountering an unsolvable task. In Experiments 1 and 2, dogs could look back or attempt an alternative puzzle. In both experiments, dogs attempted the alternative puzzle prior to looking back. In Experiment 3, when dogs encountered the unsolvable task, they could look back or attempt to solve the same puzzle using an alternate approach. As in Experiments 1 and 2, dogs attempted the alternate approach prior to looking back. Although some scholars have suggested that dogs may look back because they are overly reliant on humans, our findings suggest that dogs may instead prioritize independent exploration over looking back. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

How do communicative cues shape the way that dogs (Canis familiaris) encode objects?

Our human capacity to efficiently learn from other individuals is unparalleled in any nonhuman species. Some scholars argue that our propensity to learn socially is supported by an early-emerging expectation that communicative cues will convey generic information (Csibra & Gergely, 2011). In the current 2 studies, we examine whether this expectation about generic information is unique to humans by testing a species that readily attends to human cues-dogs. Specifically, we adapted a violation of expectation paradigm previously used with human infants to examine whether communicative cues lead dogs to selectively encode generic, kind-relevant information about objects (e.g., shape). Prior work has demonstrated that human infants are more likely to notice unexpected changes in kind-relevant information in communicative contexts (i.e., when an agent points to the object; Yoon et al., 2008). In contrast, across 2 studies (N = 136), dogs were no more likely to notice kind-relevant changes in communicative contexts than noncommunicative contexts. These findings suggest that although dogs attend to human communicative cues, such cues do not shape the way that dogs encode objects. More broadly, this finding lends support to the claim that our early-emerging generic expectation crucially supports our human capacity to efficiently learn from one another. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Enhancing the Selection and Performance of Working Dogs.

Dogs perform a variety of integral roles in our society, engaging in work ranging from assistance (e.g., service dogs, guide dogs) and therapy to detection (e.g., search-and-rescue dogs, explosive detection dogs) and protection (e.g., military and law enforcement dogs). However, success in these roles, which requires dogs to meet challenging behavioral criteria and to undergo extensive training, is far from guaranteed. Therefore, enhancing the selection process is critical for the effectiveness and efficiency of working dog programs and has the potential to optimize how resources are invested in these programs, increase the number of available working dogs, and improve working dog welfare. In this paper, we review two main approaches for achieving this goal: (1) developing selection tests and criteria that can efficiently and effectively identify ideal candidates from the overall pool of candidate dogs, and (2) developing approaches to enhance performance, both at the individual and population level, via improvements in rearing, training, and breeding. We summarize key findings from the empirical literature regarding best practices for assessing, selecting, and improving working dogs, and conclude with future steps and recommendations for working dog organizations, breeders, trainers, and researchers.

Working Dog Training for the Twenty-First Century.

Dogs are trained for a variety of working roles including assistance, protection, and detection work. Many canine working roles, in their modern iterations, were developed at the turn of the 20th century and training practices have since largely been passed down from trainer to trainer. In parallel, research in psychology has advanced our understanding of animal behavior, and specifically canine learning and cognition, over the last 20 years; however, this field has had little focus or practical impact on working dog training. The aims of this narrative review are to (1) orient the reader to key advances in animal behavior that we view as having important implications for working dog training, (2) highlight where such information is already implemented, and (3) indicate areas for future collaborative research bridging the gap between research and practice. Through a selective review of research on canine learning and behavior and training of working dogs, we hope to combine advances from scientists and practitioners to lead to better, more targeted, and functional research for working dogs.

Metacognition in canids: A comparison of dogs (Canis familiaris) and dingoes (Canis dingo).

Metacognition refers to the ability to monitor one's own mental states. In the current study, we investigate whether domesticated dogs (Canis familiaris) and nondomesticated dingoes (Canis dingo) demonstrate metacognition by seeking information to remedy their own ignorance. In 2 studies, we used a naturalistic information-seeking paradigm in which subjects observed a human experimenter hiding a food reward behind an apparatus. Subjects could seek information by looking through a central window-like section of the apparatus to see where the reward was hidden. In Study 1, we tested whether dogs and dingoes were willing to seek information when interacting with the apparatus, finding that both species readily sought information when it was available to them. Study 2 provided a direct test of whether dogs and dingoes would seek information to rectify their own ignorance. We found evidence that both dogs and dingoes sought out information and were more likely do so when they did not already know where the treat was hidden. These results provide additional evidence suggesting that domesticated dogs seek information in the face of ignorance, as well as the first evidence of similar behavior in a nondomesticated canid. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

What is unique about shared reality? Insights from a new comparison species.

We introduce a new comparison species-domesticated dogs (Canis familaris)-that can shed light on the evolutionary origins of shared reality. Given that dogs share many basic building blocks of shared reality (e.g. representing others' perceptions, emotions, and behaviors) they provide an ideal species for pinpointing unique aspects of shared reality in humans. In particular, current research with dogs underscores two aspects of shared reality that may be special to humans. First, humans may be unique in our tendency to share reality involuntarily. Second, humans may be unique in the extent to which we share reality. Although both humans and dogs share reality in one-on-one interactions, only humans share reality at the more extensive group and cultural level.

How do children weigh competence and benevolence when deciding whom to trust?

In three experiments, we investigate how 187 3- to 5-year-olds weigh competence and benevolence when deciding whom to trust. Children were presented with two informants who provided conflicting labels for novel objects--one informant was competent, but mean, the other incompetent, but nice. Across experiments, we manipulated the order in which competence and benevolence were presented and the way in which they were described (via trait labels or descriptions of prior behavior). When competence was described via prior behavior (Experiments 1-2), children endorsed the informants' labels equally. In contrast, when competence was described via trait labels (Experiment 3), children endorsed labels provided by the competent, mean informant. When considering children's endorsement at the individual level, we found their ability to evaluate competence, not benevolence, related to their endorsements. These findings emphasize the importance of considering how children process information about informants and use this information to determine whom to trust.