Copy cats and dogs

We all know that we can get our pets to do just about anything to be rewarded by food, but are they actually as keen without it?

Just like tiny humans, tiny animals learn how to survive from others around them. Whether learning to avoid predators so they’re not eaten by one, or learning not to walk out into traffic, social learning; or observing and being shown by others what to do; plays an important role in development.

Researchers from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, have taken this investigation further in their work studying how animals learn from humans. In recent research, they’ve tried to understand if in actual fact, years of domestication of some animals as pets has pre-conditioned them to copy human behaviours, not just the motivation of food as a reward.

The researchers predicted that dog puppies would be more likely to copy the actions of a human than kittens or wolf pups.

They tested this by introducing each of the animals to a range of objects and comparing their response to the object, with or without a human demonstrating how to use it. This behaviour is called "spontaneous action matching" which is basically copying what a person does with an object.

They found that dog puppies were more likely to watch and then repeat the action the person showed them without any food reward, compared to kittens or wolf pups. These results support our understanding that dogs show a higher social orientation toward humans and a stronger tendency to match their actions but importantly, demonstrates that this tendency in puppies is not elicited by food rewards, but occurs spontaneously. This suggests that domestication may have influenced the social learning abilities of dogs.

The researchers explain the possible reason for this, “This action matching tendency may mainly serve the purpose of maintenance of social cohesion and affiliation”.

This spontaneous tendency has practical applications, for example in helping humans be more effective at using puppy-training methods that rely less on food rewards, and instead tap into a puppies’ natural predisposition for social learning.

Source:

Fugazza, C., Temesi, A., Coronas, R., Uccheddu, S., Gácsi, M. and Pogány, Á. (2023). Spontaneous action matching in dog puppies, kittens and wolf pups. Scientific Reports, 13(1), p.2094. doi:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-28959-5.‌

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