Cognitive tools and emotional context in canine cooperation

Cooperation is a fundamental aspect of human societies and has triggered much research in economics and psychology. Although it is clear that human collaborative skills are exceptional, comparisons with animal species may reveal the evolutionary origins and the functional relevance of cooperation. Moreover, they provide us with the opportunity to understand the proximate mechanisms and the development of cooperation in ontogeny. Thus, to gain a full insight into the ultimate and proximate processes as well as into the development of cooperation, the main objective of our project is to investigate these aspects of cooperation in an integrative model. Cooperation is at the core of the canine social organization, thus making wolf packs and domestic dogs the ideal model system to analyze cooperation with conspecific and human partners. We plan to establish 2 groups of wolves (total of 16-20) and two groups of domestic dogs (total of 20), which will be raised in peer groups by human hand-raiser. The evolutionary background shall be explored through the comparison of cooperation in wolf- and dog-groups raised the same way. We expect that wolves rather than dogs will readily and skilfully cooperate among themselves, but that dogs will be better than wolves cooperating with humans. Through controlled hand-raising and cognitive tasks, the animals` emotional and cognitive development will be systematically followed and explored. We will investigate the emotional development by observing the establishment and dynamics of social relationships and by repeatedly conducting a range of tests in the social domain (social reference and social attraction) as well as in the physical domain (subjects` neophobic reactions towards novel objects and their motivational background). Complementary physiological measurements (e.g. cortical levels from saliva samples) will be taken throughout the tests to get an independent measurement of the acute stress of the animals and of its personality. The development of cognitive abilities presumably underlying cooperation will be analyzed repeatedly by testing gaze-following, social attention as well as means-end understanding and size/number discrimination. In adulthood the cooperative potential of canine-canine and human-canine dyads will be tested in a social facilitation tasks where animals can cooperatively overcome neophobia and with a well-established string-pulling task. The two different cooperation tasks allow for investigating the interplay with proximate mechanisms by varying whether the causal structure of the problem to be solved cooperatively is opaque or transparent (cognitive understanding) or whether the partner to interact with is preferred or not (emotional attitude). The proposal is based on considerable experience by the applicant and her collaborators including Prof. Adam Miklosi (Department of Ethology, Eötvös University, Budapest). Pilot studies for the current project have been conducted with wolves in a zoo setting, where the animals successfully cooperated in a string pulling task. A further pilot study to investigate cooperation in dogs is under way in collaboration with Department of Ethology, Eötvös University and the Konrad Lorenz Forschungsstelle, Austria. Moreover, we recently established the wolf science center (www.wolfscience.at), where the first 4 wolf pups will be handraised and tested according to this proposal this spring.

Dogs have been part of the human society for at least the last 15 000 years; they closely cooperate with us and have acquired many different roles in our life from guarding the house to assisting disabled people, hunters and policemen. These various functions clearly rely on the mental abilities of dogs: they have to learn lots of things and often have to make decisions on their own. Dogs originated from the wolf, and though we know that during domestication they adapted in several ways to live among humans, it is unclear, if and to what extent their cooperative and problem solving skills differ from those of wolves. One popular domestication hypothesis emphasize the extraordinary cooperativeness of domestic dogs and propose that their tamer, more tolerant temperament in comparison to wolves, allowed for the development of their human-like social skills. However, wolves rely extensively on cooperation with conspecifics during daily life (e.g. rearing of young, defence of territories and probably hunting) in comparison to feral dogs, leading us to emphasize the cooperativeness of wolves as a potential source of dog-human cooperation in contrast to domestication. At the Wolf Science Center we raise and keep dog- and wolf packs identically socializing them similarly with humans as well as with conspecifics. Accordingly, the set-up allows for a valid comparison of the two species to tackle the effect of domestication on dogs abilities. We found that in the social domain, that while dogs are very good in cooperative communication tasks especially if a human is involved giving very obvious signals such as pointing with a finger, wolves outperform the dogs when more subtle, species typical communication cues (e.g. turning the head to gaze in a specific direction) are provided independently if the cue is given by a human or conspecific. Other experiments showed better performance of wolves in social learning tasks, suggesting that they are more attentive towards conspecifics than their domestic counterparts. Moreover, wolves are also more tolerant than dogs in feeding situations allowing subdominant animals to get access to the food. These results suggest that intraspecific relationships might be more important for wolves than for dogs whereas dogs very often turn towards humans to get their support if the chance arises. In regard to their development and skills in the physical domain, we did not find large differences in wolves and dogs performance neither towards novel objects nor in their understanding of means-end relations and probably numerical competence.Overall, the results indicate that the differences between wolves and dogs might not be as clear-cut as previously thought and have led us to rethink current domestication hypotheses. However, further experiments will be necessary to better understand exactly what has changed during the course of domestication and which skills of our best friend stem from their ancestors.