Social learning strategies in free-ranging dogs

Our world is changing at high speed and animals struggle to adapt to such fast changes. Learning from others can be one of the least expensive way to adapt to such changes. However, information provided by others can also be misleading, so animals employ specific strategies to decide when, what, and from whom to learn depending on the context. Free-ranging dogs live in groups in a varied and fast-changing environment, thus providing a perfect model to investigate whether and how social dynamics affect the use of social learning. First, we will observe how free-ranging dogs interact with one another to assess the relationships between them. Then, to test whether free-ranging dogs learn from others and what type of information they learn, we will run non-invasive field experiments. We will introduce new tasks where dogs need to show a specific behaviour to have access to food (e.g. a box with a door that needs to be opened to obtain the food). We will use three different tasks, varying in complexity. We will measure whether dogs prefer to learn alone or after observing others, and whether they learn preferably from some partners than from others (e.g. partners with whom they are more closely bonded). We will also test if dogs adopt a behavior that is shown by the majority of other individuals, by testing puppies joining a group after weaning, as well as adults migrating to a new group. As pet dogs have the ability to learn from other individuals, we hypothesize that also free-ranging dogs will learn from others when facing novel challenges. More specifically, when presented with a series of novel tasks: 1) dogs will learn socially from other dogs who already know how to solve the task; 2) this will result in the diffusion of the novel behavior in the group; 3) the pattern of the diffusion will be dependent on the bonds between individuals; 4) puppies as well as 5) migrating adults will learn from other individuals when joining a new group; 6) dogs will learn socially depending on how complex is the task. This is the first project investigating social learning in free-ranging dogs, where measures of dogs social dynamics can be included. Thanks to the fact that free-ranging dogs are used to eat different type of food that can be accessed in simple or complex ways, we can explore the potential to learn from others across different tasks.