From Cara Murez
HealthDay reporter
FRIDAY, June 4, 2021 (HealthDay News) – If it looks like your dog knows exactly what you’re saying, it’s because dogs are ready to communicate with people, according to a new study.
The study, published June 3 in the journal Current Biology, suggests that even puppies have the ability to interact with people with no prior experience or training. However, some are better at communicating than others because of their genetics.
“We show that puppies reciprocate a person’s social gaze and successfully use the information given by a person in a social context at a very young age and before extensive experience with people,” said study author Emily Bray of the University of Arizona. “For example, even before pups leave their littermates to live one-on-one with their volunteer breeders, most of them are able to find hidden food by following a human point to the specified location.”
More than 40% of the differences in a puppy’s ability to follow a person’s pointing or gaze behavior during a task in the human interest are explained by the genes they have inherited, researchers found.
“These are pretty high numbers, similar to estimates of the heritable genetic makeup of our own species,” Bray said in a journal press release. “All of these results suggest that dogs are biologically prepared to communicate with humans.”
Bray and her colleagues have conducted research on dogs for the past 10 years with Canine Companions, a U.S. service dog organization that serves clients with physical disabilities.
Your goal is to better understand how dogs think and solve problems, and how these skills develop and change over time. Her research is also working to understand how dogs’ individual experiences and genes contribute to these skills. This can have real world implications for service dogs.
For the study, the researchers worked with 375 eight-week-old prospective service dogs who had a similar rearing history and a familiar pedigree going back several generations, and tested them for specific tasks.
Here is one of the dogs doing a task:
continuation
The research team knew how related all the pups were to each other, so they could then use this information to create a statistical model that assessed genetic factors versus environmental factors.
The results showed that puppies were adept at social communication that relied on gestures and eye contact. This communication only worked if people also initiated the interaction by speaking to the pups in a high voice. Without a person to initiate communication, the pups usually didn’t look for answers to a task that involved, for example, food being enclosed in a plastic container.
“Dogs exhibit human-like social skills at a young age that have a strong genetic component, meaning those skills have strong potential for selection,” said Bray. “Our results could therefore point to an important part of the history of domestication, as animals with a propensity to communicate with our own species were selected in the wolf populations from which dogs emerged.”
Researchers are now planning to identify the genes that contribute to the puppy’s behavior. They are currently collecting cognitive data and blood samples from adult dogs and plan to conduct a genome-wide association study.
You will also track the results of the dogs tested in the service dog program to see if performance on any of the social tasks tested predicts successful completion as a service dog after eight weeks.
More information
The American Kennel Club offers some dog training advice.
SOURCE: Current Biology, press release, June 3, 2021
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