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Dog Imitation and Its Possible Origins

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Domestic Dog Cognition and Behavior

Abstract

The question of social learning in dogs is characterized by dispute. Ever since Thorndike more than a century ago, researchers believed that domestic dogs have poor social learning skills. However, recently it has been proposed that dogs have enhanced social cognitive skills due to their selection to live in the human environment and cooperative with humans. Thus, dogs might not just be able to learn through observation from conspecifics but also from humans. The most convincing argument for the latter assumption would be experimental evidence of true imitation, since imitation is considered to be the most complex and also most rare social learning mechanism in the animal kingdom. In this chapter, we will report recent evidence first of social facilitation and social influences on individual learning and then of true social learning in dogs. The latter includes three hallmarks of imitation: faithful copying (of both a human and a conspecific model), deferred imitation, and selective imitation. In the final part we address the potential origins of these remarkable skills of dogs. We propose imitation has been inherited from their ancestors, wolves, which are well known for their advanced social system, including cooperative breeding and hunting. This hypothesis has recently been supported by experimental evidence with wolves outperforming dogs in a manipulative problem-solving task after observation of a skilled conspecific.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Messerli Research Institute, University of Veterinary Medicine, Medical University of Vienna, University of Vienna, Veterinärplatz 1, 1210, Vienna, Austria

    Ludwig Huber, Friederike Range & Zsófia Virányi

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  1. Ludwig Huber
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  2. Friederike Range
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Correspondence to Ludwig Huber .

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  1. Department of Psychology, Columbia University Barnard College, New York, New York, USA

    Alexandra Horowitz

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Huber, L., Range, F., Virányi, Z. (2014). Dog Imitation and Its Possible Origins. In: Horowitz, A. (eds) Domestic Dog Cognition and Behavior. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-53994-7_4

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