Canis familiaris, domestic dog facts at GeoChemBio at GeoChemBio: behavior

Canis lupus familiaris, dog behavior

Aspects of canine behavior

Three different aspects of behavior in dogs have attracted geneticists: behavior associated with personality, such as loyalty and protectiveness; behavioral disorders, including rage and obsessive-compulsive disease (OCD); and breed-defining behaviors, including herding, drafting, and pointing.

Ethologists are interested in dog's cognition, social intelligence and learning abilities (from individual experience and from social interactions with other dogs (conspecifics) as well as humans (heterospecifics).

Altered physical appearance of the domestic dogs and, sometimes, complete absence of many physical traits essential for social signaling by adult wolves to communicate fear, aggression, territoriality, etc., especially traits relating to the muzzle, ears, coat, eyes, and tail, has led to modification of dog behavior.

In dogs, domestication has led to breeds that exhibit an underdevelopment of traits important in the communication and social behavior of adult wolfs whereas some juvenile characteristics persisted and even became exaggerated as the result of neoteny (also called, juvenalization or pedomorphism) defined as retardation of development and retention of juvenile traits into adulthood.

Pedomorphism in dogs, dogs-babies

Comparison of hand-reared wolves' and dogs' social cognition in relation to humans is very tricky and often results are unreliable due to differences in ontogeny of their social behavior. For wolves critical period of socialization begins earlier and is shorter than in dogs (3-12 weeks of age). At 2-3 weeks of age, wolf pups are already can explore their environment and are much more coordinated in their movements than their dog counterparts who start walking unsteadily only during 3-4.5 week of life. For effective socialization with humans, wolves must be removed from their mother between 10 and 14 days of age and raised with a human caregiver around the clock until 3 or 4 months of age. In comparison to wolves, dogs only begin socialization once they can walk, and they continue to form primary social relationship until at least 12 weeks of age, and potentially up to 16 weeks of age for some breeds. In other words, the slower development of domestic dogs allows for an extension of the sensitive period of socialization, increasing the probability that they will form social bonds with humans by "lingering" in their puppyhood. Moreover, puppy-like behavior is often reinforced by positive feedback given by humans not only during life of the dog but also during selective breeding. The latter facilitated neoteny especially in pet breeds.

Pedomorphism in dogs, dogs-babies-like behavior

Sensitivity to human actions

Dog trainers and owners often like to tell stories about sensitivity and attentiveness of their dogs to various human cues including specific gestures, overall body language as well as tone of voice and specific words. Indeed, the incredible sensitivity to human actions is one of the most fascinating aspects of canine behavior which attracted attention of behaviorists over the last two decades.

There are four main categories of human cue used by dogs:

Behaving with regard to attentional state (theory of mind)
...an animal with a theory of mind believes that mental states play a causal role in generating behaviour and infers the presence of mental states in others by observing their appearance and behavior under various circumstances (Hayes, 1998).
Most trivial example of behavior illustrating that dogs are highly attuned to attentive state of the human companion is that they ususally refrain from misbehaving (for example, taking forbidden food) when human is looking at them but may lose their inhibitions once they see that they are not watched.
Word learning
In study by Kaminski, Call & Fischer (2004) a border collie Rico was not only credited with the ability to retrieve over 200 different items by vocal command, but was able to retrieve a novel item from a group of unfamiliar item by name (learning by exclusion) in 70% of trials. Rico's performance as well as countless anecdotal evidence offers an example of the potential of dogs to learn and discriminate words of human language and respond accordingly.
Social learning and imitation
Results of many experiments suggest that the dogs are able to obtain information of varying complexity by observing either a human or a dog demonstrator, including cases in which the goal or the result of the action is not clear. Behavioral conformity may enhance the efficiency of interactions among group members and dogs probably have been selected for a willingness to attend to behavioral actions of both humans and conspecifics. Classic behaviors that are tested in experiments on social learning are learning detour by observation and object manipulation tasks.
Following points
Point-following is often one of the first tests of sensitivity to human cues conducted with individuals in a species or population. Even as puppies, dogs are adept at taking cues from humans such as following hand that points to hidden food. The chimpanzee are notoriously poor at performing this task. Other commonly used cues are glancing, nodding, and head-turning. In experiments, dogs were successful with various types of pointing, with exception of the elbow point and following eye movement only, although there were rapid learning effects shown in these conditions.

Dog making eye contact, guilty look