Early emerging infections and high hereditary susceptibility to human communication in dogs

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.04.055

Commentary

Human cognition is thought to be unique in part because of cooperative communication and in part because of social skills.

Comparative studies show that children as young as 2.5 years old reason about the physical world in the same way as other apes, but have acquired cooperative communication far beyond that of their closest primate relatives.

As a result, dogs are believed to be flexible and responsive to various forms of cooperative gestures from the earliest stages of their development. Like human children, dogs mark gestures as communicative and are sensitive to the contextual factors necessary to make inferences about these communicative acts, according to the study.

However, because the potential biological basis of these abilities remains untested, the study was investigating their developmental and genetic origins.

The study tested 375 8-week-old puppies on a series of social-cognitive measures and hypothesized that if a dog's skills for cooperating with humans are biologically prepared, they should not require extensive socialization or learning and should exhibit genetic variation.

The results showed that puppies were skilled in using a wide variety of human gestures and that no evidence was found that their performance required learning.

Importantly, more than 40 percent of the variability in dogs' point-tracking ability and attention to human faces can be attributed to genetic factors. This result would suggest that social skills in dogs appear early in development and are under strong genetic control.